A Study of Google Translate Translations: An Error Analysis of Indonesian-to-English Texts

Abstract

Nowadays, internet technology allows everyone to access information from all corners of the world anytime and anywhere. One of the tool that helps internet users to find information effectively is Google. Google currently offers a variety of applications, one of which is Google-Translate. Google-Translate is used to translate from the source language to the target language. However, the results of the translation are often inappropriate or have some errors. The error analysis always occurs in grammar and selection of inappropriate words. Therefore, the objective of this research is to find out whether there are translation errors and to find out the types of translation errors that occur in the translation results in Kompas news text. The data analyzed are the news text of Kompas in Indonesian translates into English by Google-Translate. This study used the descriptive qualitative method. To examine the validity of this research the researchers use triangulation. From the data analyzed, there are 25 translation errors in Kompas news text. The dominance of translation error occurs in translation errors on the deviation of meaning where the number of translation errors is 16.

Keywords: translation, error analysis, Google-Translate, Indonesian-English