Empowering Machine Translation to Render Idioms from English to Persian

As a subdivision of computational linguistics, machine translation (also called automated translation) is defined as the use of a computer to translate a text from the source language into the target language. When it comes to translating idiomatic expressions into the target language, the ability of these devices is questioned. This is due to the fact that the meaning of an idiom cannot usually be interpreted literally, and if it is translated literally, as the machine translation usually does, the result would be erroneous and ambiguous. The primary aim of the researchers in this study is to relook at the concept of idiom translation by an automated translation tool from a new perspective. In this study, an attempt has been made to switch the concentration on the capability of Google Translate Service in translating the idioms possessing both literal and figurative meanings. In fact, there are pure idioms whose translations literally or figuratively make sense based on the context. Yet, the tool mainly intends to render them literally into the target language even when the figurative sense is meant. By proposing a new transfer method for the aforementioned idioms, the study tries to empower the automated translation tool

Keywords:

literal meaning , figurative meaning , Google Translate Service , idiom