Cohesion and Comprehensibility in Swedish-English Machine Translated Texts

Sammanfattning: Access to various texts in different languages causes an increasing demand for fast, multi-purpose, and cheap translators. Pervasive internet use intensifies the necessity for intelligent and cheap translators, since traditional translation methods are excessively slow to translate different texts. During the past years, scientists carried out much research in order to add human and artificial intelligence into the old machine translation systems and the idea of developing a machine translation system came into existence during the days of World War (Kohenn, 2010). The new invention was useful in order to help the human translators and many other people who need to translate different types of texts according to their needs. The new translation systems are useful in meeting people’s needs. Since the machine translation systems vary according to the quality of the systems outputs, their performance should be evaluated from the linguistic point of view in order to reach a fair judgment about the quality of the systems outputs. To achieve this goal, two various Swedish texts were translated by two different machine translation systems in the thesis. The translated texts were evaluated to examine the extent to which errors affect the comprehensibility of the translations. The performances of the systems were evaluated using three approaches. Firstly, most common linguistically errors, which appear in the machine translation systems outputs, were analyzed (e.g. word alignment of the translated texts). Secondly, the influence of different types of errors on the cohesion chains were evaluated. Finally, the effect of the errors on the comprehensibility of the translations were investigated. Numerical results showed that some types of errors have more effects on the comprehensibility of the systems’ outputs. The obtained data illustrated that the subjects’ comprehension of the translated texts depend on the type of error, but not frequency. The analyzing depicted which translation system had best performance.