Machine-translated text: Is it comprehensible to proficient readears?

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate the possibility of using IBM-compatible microcomputers to produce comprehensible translations from English into Portuguese. A program was designed to store and process information about the English language, including lexical meanings, syntactic constraints and disambiguating rules. This information produced a data structure that was used to parse the English sentences and output a Portuguese text. The comprehensibility of the translated passages was tested with secondary school students by using both machine-translated passages and professional human translations. Each subject answered a reading comprehension test in both conditions. The different passages were balanced between conditions. The statistical analysis of the results indicated that the machine-translated passages, in spite of presenting some incorrect constructions, were understood by the subjects, both in terms of main ideas and details. The implications of the study are also discussed, mainly in terms of what kind of knowledge language learners should acquire to be able to interact meaningfully with authentic foreign language texts, as suggested by the findings of the investigation.