Филологические науки/ 6. Актуальные проблемы перевода

Kofanov A. E., Beskletna O. A., Vasilenko L. A.

National Technical University of Ukraine "KPI", Ukraine

Statistical Analysis of English Aphorisms'

Computer Translation Efficiency

Theoretical research of English phraseology has a wide circle of problems such as investigation of a phraseological unit as the basic notion; finding out unit's nature and origin. Phraseological unit, or idiom, is a word-group consisting of two or more words and the meaning of the whole unit usually differs from the sum of the meanings of its components [5]. Idioms can be found either in spoken English as well as in written English. They are useful in informal situation. Usually idioms are funny and colorful expressions that cannot be understood by defining the separate words.

Idioms have a great variety of structures and combinations that are mostly unchangeable; they are often not logical and may not follow basic rules of grammar [5]. By the way, idioms may require some special cultural knowledge to understand them. Some idioms are comparisons; proverbs and sayings are idioms too. A proverb is a short saying that is generally known by many people. Among phraseological units of the English language some scientists mark out so-called winged expressions or aphorisms. An aphorism is a generalized, original author's opinion given in a perfect verbal form [2,5]. They appear from people's everyday life, folklore, prose and poetry, fairy tales, songs, films and other sources.

For the reason of simplification of English aphorisms' translation it is necessary to investigate their nature, origin and formation sources. Many idioms came from Bible and from the works of well-known writers such as W. Shakespeare, W. Scott, G. G. Byron, Ch. Dickens and others [2,3]. And a lot of well known English phraseological units were adopted from literature of other peoples: French, Danish, German and Spanish. Latin words and phrases are widely used in English too [2,3]. In English there are also a lot of proverbs and aphorisms that derived from ancient Greeks and Romans [2,3]. Today new phraseological units, so-called neologisms, are also formed in modern English.

R. P. Zorivchak [4] describes three main methods of phraseological unit translation. They are phraseological method of translating, the method of phraseological replication and descriptive periphrasis method. Phraseological metod of translating can be used only if there are complete or partial equivalents of such expressions in the phraseology fund of the Ukrainian language. The essence of the method of phraseological replication is in almost "alive" interpretation, word by word, of the English expression into the Ukrainian language. The essence of the descriptive paraphrases method is a representation of English phraseological units descriptively, by free combinations of words. This choice is preferred when the denotative meaning of translation act is chosen as a dominant, and one is ready to refuse the expressive colour and the meaning nuances of an aphorism. The phraseologism becomes poorer and more specific.

Nowadays many people try to use different computer translators and electronic dictionaries but the efficiency of their application is very low. The selection of phraseological units given in this work is our choice of everyday idioms that we think are the brightest and necessary to know [1,5-7]. To demonstrate that a computer translator cannot completely replace a man we have carried out a statistical comparison of translation results made by a man and by means of the computer translator Pragma 5.x, version Standard 5.7. It has been chosen because in common and technical texts its translations are quite effective. "Linguistics" and "Proverbs" have been chosen as the themes of translation.

So having investigated the problem of English phraseologisms' translation into Ukrainian we have drawn the following conclusions. For 45 investigated English aphorisms the best translation results have been obtained in the case of phraseological replication method application. Here we have only 40 % of unsatisfactory computer representations. The worst results have been obtained in the case of descriptive periphrasis method. Here we have more than 93 % of unsatisfactory results of computer translation. And in the case of phraseological method of translating this result is nearly 67 %. It should be noted that the essence of the phraseological replication method is in almost "alive" interpretation, word by word, of the English expression into the Ukrainian language. So that is why we have obtained such good results of computer translation. In general, we have received qualitative results of computer translation only for 33 % from the general amount of the cases. In other 67 % we have got unsatisfactory results of computer translation.

So carried out statistical analysis of the translation results done by a man and with the help of a computer confirms our idea about the impossibility of a man translator replacement nowadays. A computer will never be able to feel itself as a part of culture of definite nation. So only a man can integrate all norms and rules of culture of other peoples and give the most original and the brightest translations.

LITERATURE

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