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Article published In:
Target
Vol. 36:2 (2024) ► pp.215–244

To be or not to be

A translation reception study of a literary text translated into Dutch and Catalan using machine translation

ORCID logo | University of Groningen
ORCID logo | University of Groningen

This article presents the results of a study focusing on the reception of a fictional story by Kurt Vonnegut translated from English into Catalan and Dutch in three conditions: machine translated, post-edited, and human translated. Participants (n = 223) rated the three conditions using three scales: narrative engagement, enjoyment, and translation reception. The results show that human translation had higher engagement, enjoyment, and translation reception in Catalan, compared to the post-edited and machine-translated translations. However, Dutch readers scored the post-edited translation higher than the human and machine translation, and the highest engagement and enjoyment scores were reported for the original English version. We hypothesize that when reading a fictional story in translation, not only are the condition and the quality of the translation key to understanding its reception, but also the participants’ reading patterns, reading language, and, potentially, the status of the source language in their own societies.

Keywords: literary translation, translation reception, machine translation, post-editing, narrative engagement, enjoyment, comprehension, creativity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Related work
  • 3.Overall reading experience: Methodology
    • 3.1Source text
    • 3.2Target texts
    • 3.3Participants
    • 3.4Reading conditions
    • 3.5Questionnaire
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Similarities and differences between groups
    • 4.3Comprehension questions
    • 4.4Narrative engagement
    • 4.5Visual imagery
    • 4.6Enjoyment
    • 4.7Translation reception
    • 4.8Comparison between translation and original text
    • 4.9How much would you pay?
    • 4.10Quality of the MT systems according to the readers
    • 4.11Summary of findings
    • 4.12Comments from the readers
      • 4.12.1Difficult parts
      • 4.12.2Preferred sections
      • 4.12.3How did you realize it was a translation?
      • 4.12.4Final comments
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 2 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.22134.gue
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