Persisting Grammatical Errors of Machine Translation

Abstract

The paper investigates the quality of machine translation (MT) and traces its development through two main approaches – Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) – by comparing English-to-Slovak outputs produced by Google Translate. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the quality of MT outputs from the point of view of two typologically different languages – English, a predominantly analytic language, and Slovak, a primarily synthetic language – using a sample of newspaper texts, which are often translated by machine due to their wide vocabulary and varied subject matter. The research results indicate that NMT (obtained in 2023), compared to its predecessor SMT (obtained in 2017), has significantly improved in almost all framework categories. The NMT output is much more fluent, sounding more natural and comprehensible. In contrast, shortcomings can be found in the category of syntactic-semantic correlativeness and lexical semantics. In such cases, neural MT may struggle to select the appropriate fit-in-context meaning; moreover, these lexemes can further shift the meaning of the entire sentence, clause, or even utterance.