English-Turkish Literary Translation Through Human-Machine Interaction

Abstract

This article investigates perceptions of technology-mediated translations of literary texts by two groups: translation students and professional literary translators. The participants post-edited an excerpt from a classic Dickens novel into Turkish using a machine translation (MT) system of their choice. The analysis of the post-edited texts, participants’ answers to survey questions, and interviews with professional translators suggest that MT is currently a long way from being an essential part of any literary translation practice for the English–Turkish language pair. Translators’ interactions with MT and negative attitudes toward it may change in a positive direction as MT improves and translation practice evolves.

Keywords

• literary translation
• machine translation
• post-editing
• human-computer interaction
• translation technology