A critical comparison of translator and machine translation in literary translation: The case of "To Kill a Mockingbird"

This study focuses on literary translation and Machine Translation, one of the most controversial areas of translation studies, rather than a comparison between human translators. It is aimed to examine the success of Machine Translation on literary texts, which provides great convenience to translators in the translation process. With the integration of artificial intelligence technology into all areas of life, Google Translate, a Neural Machine Translation system, has increased in popularity in recent years. Considering its limitations and potential, the starting point of the study is whether the translation made with Google Translate without pre- and post-editing can achieve a translation that is linguistically, culturally and contextually acceptable according to Toury's initial norms. As research objects, Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1960), which has had a great place in both the literary and popular culture from the time it was published to the present, and which came to the fore after the death of the author in 2016, is chosen as the source text. "Bülbülü Öldürmek" (2021), the most up-to-date Turkish translation of the book by Ülker İnce, and the translations by Google Translate (2022) without the pre- and post-editing are selected as the target texts. With the comparative analysis method, which is one of the descriptive research methods, both text analysis and a comparative analysis of translated texts in the context of human translator and Google Translate decisions are conducted. This study discusses the working principles of existing Machine Translation systems, artificial intelligence problems arising from the lack of contextual understanding of the source text, and the place of cultural competence in translation apart from language competence. The study also argues that in Neural Machine Translation, artificial intelligence can better understand the context when it can recognize the type of text, and this can be the first step towards producing a quality literary translation.