An analysis of Google translation and human translation when translating idiomatic expressions from Sinhala into Tamil translation

Abstract

Translation is a social phenomenon. Translating a text from one language into another language is not an easy task, especially in idiomatic expressions. This study aims to analyse the idiomatic expressions with Google Translation and Human Translation. Google translation is a free service of Google; it is one of the tools which were used by many of them. This study adopted the descriptive qualitative method to analyse the data. This paper focuses on 20 sentences with idiomatic expressions, which were randomly selected by the researcher and translated through Google Translator and Human Translation (researcher’s knowledge). Every sentence was analysed in a detailed manner. Moreover, the final result of the study displayed that twenty out of only four sentences were correctly translated by Google Translate. It was identified that Google translates mostly uses the direct translation method, word for word translation and transliteration method. This paper identified the discussed the mistranslation of idiomatic expressions when using the Google translation.