Challenges of Translating Conversational Implicatures from English to Kiswahili using Computer Assisted Tools

A Case of 'Google Translate'

Abstract

In this study, we investigated challenges faced by computer assisted translation software with special focus on Google Translate, in translating conversational implicatures from English to Kiswahili. The data for this study were sourced from William Shakespeare's play, “The Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice” which has been translated to Kiswahili as “Othello, Tanzia ya Mtu Mweusi.” The data was informed by Grice’s (1975) conversational implicature theory, and the relevance-theoretic translation approach as postulated by Gutt (1991). To evaluate the quality of Google Translate computer assisted translation system, we made a comparison of the computer translated output with the human translated text to ascertain to what extent the meaning of the conversational implicatures in the source language is preserved in the target text. We further examined challenges encountered by Google Translate in the process of translating conversational implicatures and suggested what could be done to improve Google Translate method to ensure accuracy in translating conversational implicatures. The results indicate that, there is inferior translation quality of the target text with ambiguous words and sentences. Also, it was observed that it is challenging to translate conversational implicatures using Google Translate because it has not been programmed to process aspects of source culture or adapt to the aspects of target culture thus cannot correctly translate conversational implicatures. Besides that, other challenges posed range from lexical, syntactic, and semantic to pragmatic mismatch.