A COMPARISON OF WORD, ABOVE WORD, AND GRAMMATICAL EQUIVALENCE OF GOOGLE AND HUMAN TRANSLATION OUTPUT IN MEDICAL-SURGICAL NURSING BOOK

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the equivalence of translation results produced by Google Translate and the human translator in terms of equivalence at word level, above word level, and grammatical equivalence. This study was designed as a descriptive qualitative research. Moreover, the data were taken from a medical book entitled ‘Handbook for Brunner and Suddarth's Textbook of Medical-Surgical Nursing’ and its translation ‘Keperawatan Medikal-Bedah Brunner & Suddarth’. The data were identified and analyzed based on the concept of equivalence proposed by Baker (1992). The result showed that at word level, there were 5 out of 51 data were identified having different interpretations and only 1 had the same meaning to the SL. Meanwhile, there found 30 out of 51 data were identified in terms of equivalence above word level. In which, the majority of 16 phrases out of 30 translated in different choice of words leading to different meaning as intended in the SL. Furthermore, the category of grammatical equivalence found in the translation produced by Google Translate and human translator are number, voice and tense. In terms of number, the most changes occurred in the human translation is in the form of plural to singular, while in the Google translation, the plural nouns were translated into both singular and plural nouns. Moreover, in terms of voice, Google Translate translated in the same form as in the source language, while in the human translation, the form changed from SL active into passive and SL passive into active. In the category of tense and aspect, the human translator translated changed SL present perfect into TL present, while Google Translate added temporal determiners to show the adverb of time of the sentence.