The Use of Machine Translation in Children’s Literature: A Case Study on Robinson Crusoe Based on Children’s Opinions
Keywords:
Translation Studies, children's literature, children’s literature translation, machine translation, Robinson CrusoeAbstract
Research on machine translation (MT) started before the discipline of Translation Studies was even named. Although MT lost its popularity as a research topic from time to time, it has been widely researched in the related literature over the last 20 years. On the other hand, children’s literature, as a discrete topic, has a similar research history to MT. This study aims to question the current use of MT in children’s literature and to explore children’s views on recent MT outputs of children’s literature. The present qualitative research used a case study methodology. Two Turkish MT outputs of Robinson Crusoe, published by Oxford University Press for children in 2000, were collected through DeepL and Google Translate. These two MT outputs were read by the participants who were four children aged 10-12. These participants were chosen by adapting the convenience sampling method. Their opinions about the translations of children’s literature were collected through in-depth interviews. The results of the study mainly reveal that the participants preferred the MT output of DeepL for a number of reasons, although they stated that they understood both MT outputs. In the current study, children’s preferences were shown to vary in response to fluency, the use of regular sentences, correct grammar, and punctuation in those MT outputs. In addition, it was uncovered that the older the participants got, the less their need for visuals existed while comprehending the texts. As a result, it was observed that the MT output of DeepL produced promising translation solutions in the genre of children's literature in the Turkish-English language pair.
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