Deviations Semantiques Occassionnees Par Les Outils De Traduction : Cas De La Traduction Français-Anglais De La Charte Africaine Des Droits De L’homme

Abstract

This study focused on machine translation (Mathieu, 2008) and translation techniques or processes (Vinay and Darbelnet, 1958), used by some translation softwares. It focused on the translation of specialized texts, in this case legal translation from French to English using translation software namely Power Translator and Babylon 10. This research will be useful to online users who need to translate website information and who cannot understand the target language that they need to translate to, translators who make use of translation softwares as well as various internationally based organizations in general, that may not be in a position to translate all of their websites or information about their products into all the languages of the world. Its objectives were to determine the processes used by translation software and to establish the main challenges that translators face in using these translation softwares in order to suggest the steps to be followed in using them. We also studied the quality of translation produced by two translation software and whether these translations different in the same way, in this case Power Translator and Babylon 10. We used observation forms and comparison tables to collect data. These methods enabled us to identify the translation techniques used by the machine translators in order to analyze them using Vinay and Darbelnet stylistics theory. After a comparative analysis, we established that all the three translations differ in the choice of words especially polysemy, translation techniques among other differences. The translation soft wares used direct translation techniques more while the human translator used indirect ones more. On comparing translation results by Babylon 10 and Power Translator, we noted a lot of differences. Furthermore, in certain cases, the first words of sentences that are very long remain untranslated when using Power Translator. It also appears that translation by Babylon 10 is more or less acceptable than translation by Power Translator because PT has difficulties choosing among polysemy words. There are many challenges emanating from automatic translation and therefore the human translator remains indispensable in document translation.