Uluslararası Dil ve Çeviri Çalışmaları Dergisi

Öz

This study includes a discussion on the literary translation and machine translation of “Anne of Green Gables”, a novel by the Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery, one of the popular culture publications, the novel is a summary of the events that are narrated in what is originally a collection of eight books. In this article, differences between human and machine translation have been studied, with special emphasis on the importance of human factor in translation. This study has been conducted by using online machine translation applications such as Google and Yandex translation tools. The article aims to highlight the importance of features peculiar to the writer and the work at the stage of post-editing done by a human translator. Besides, this study tries to find out the best way to make translations of literary works in recent technological research on machine translation. An assessment has been made on the translation of the novel by conventional methods and by applications of computer-aided machine translations. One of the goals of this study is to show that, as with many types of publications, popular culture publications can be rendered through machine translation. In the evaluation, the method of “rule-based machine translation” has been preferred. This method, which allows the researcher to work more actively, has been found to be more scientific than other types of machine translation. Moreover, it has been found that machine translation systems such as Google Translate and Yandex Translate have a number of shortcomings in transferring concepts related to the sense being communicated, and that they operate by a system based on structures at lexical level. Today, with the machine translation becoming more widely available, it has been seen that post-editing done by human editors contributes significantly to enhancing the quality of literary translations, including works of popular culture. In this process, special emphasis has been placed on issues such as post-editors’ conception of the task being done, their way of looking at the world, and their knowledge about literary translation. The examples given in this study revealed that, particularly in literary translation, every post-editing procedure does not always yield effective results, and that everything depends on the translator’s background knowledge and his/her competence in literary translation. Discussions have been made on this topic, with special emphasis on the translator’s ability to interpret a literary text.