Machine Translation, Post-Editing, and the indefinite pronoun man

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze automatic translation solutions made from German to Portuguese by Google Translate® in the context of a literary text subtitling project. The project involved subtitling lives with German authors and took place in the context of the series of lives on contemporary German literature entitled Über.Leben.Schreiben, organized by the Goethe Institut in 2021. In this analysis, we look at the translation solutions given by the translation tool for the German indefinite pronoun man. After analyzing the corpus, it can be said that machine translation has come a long way and that the solutions provided by Google Translate® show a dynamic translation that takes into account different equivalent structures for the pronoun man in Portuguese according to the context. Although machine translation has a high accuracy rate, post-editing by the translator remains indispensable. In the specific case of the translation solutions for the pronoun analyzed, however, there were relatively few interventions.