Can Machine Translations Translate Humorous Texts?

Abstract

Machine translation (MT) have attracted many researchers’attention in various ways. Although the advanced of technology brings development to the result of MT, the quality are still criticized. One of the texts that has great challenges and translation problems is humorous text. Humorous texts that trigger a smile or laugh should have the same effect in another language. Humor uses linguistic, cultural, and universal aspects to create joke or humor. These raise questions how do machines translate humorous texts from English into Indonesian? This article aimed at comparing the translation result and error made by three prominent Machine Translations (Google Translate, Yandex Translate, and Bing Microsoft Translator) in translating humorous texts. This research applied qualitative descriptive method. The data were taken by comparing the translation results produced by 3 online Machine Translations in translating four humorous texts. The findings show that Google Translate produced better translation result. There are some errors related to lexical, syntaxis, semantics, and pragmatics errors in the. The implication of this finding shows that machine translation still need human in post editing to produce similar effect to preserve the humor.