A Semantic Analysis of Machine Translation of English Advertising Slogans and its Application in Teaching

Translation is a communication channel between different nations and should not be regarded as a simple matter. Machine translation (M.T.) has created a solution for people who need quick and low-cost translations; however, the appropriateness of the output cannot be ignored. According to the translation commission, the commissioner and the translator, who determine the scope and dimensions of adequacy, play a pivotal role in the translation process. The purpose of this study was to show the efficiency of M.T. in the advertising industry and to evaluate and possibly suggest improvements regarding the output of machine translations, so the message of a slogan can be quickly transferred to the receiver. Finally, this piece of research aims to compare the machine translations' output with the original slogan. To this end, the researcher sampled ۶۰ English slogans and M.T. Persian translations of these slogans. The samples were selected through stratified random sampling during the first semester of ۲۰۲۰-۲۱. ۷۰ professors, from ۶ cities has participated in filling out the questionnaire. Research instrument included an electronic fill-in questionnaire using Porsal, a survey maker program, which was developed by computer software. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and a Chi-Square test in SPSS v. ۲۳. to see if there is a difference between women and men in judging the message of the slogan. Then, the appropriateness and translations' accuracy was discussed in terms of relativity and context-dependence of the choice of translation strategy. The results of this study showed that the degree of agreement of professors with the literal translation of designed phrases are, ۸.۸% rated it as weak, ۷۵% as moderate and ۱۶.۲% as good. Also, the results of Chi-square test also show that the value of the significant level of the test is equal to ۰.۱۵۲ and more than ۰.۰۵, which indicates that there is no significant difference between the respondents in evaluating the message of machine translation of slogans. This research proves that the M.T. of slogans cannot be changed since the concept will be changed too. In some cases, the result of M.T. can be used as an equivalence of the original by applying some minor changes, but regarding advertising slogans, in order to keep the message, changes should be applied in structure, length, tense and semantics.

کلیدواژه ها:

Advertising Slogans ، Machine Translation ، Slogan ، Translation