Google Translate Performance in Translating English Passive Voice into Indonesian
Abstract
A scant number of Google Translate users and researchers continue to be skeptical of the current Google Translate's performance as a machine translation tool. As English passive voice translation often brings problems, especially when translated into Indonesian which rich of affixes, this study works to analyze the way Google Translate (MT) translates English passive voice into Indonesian and to investigate whether Google Translate (MT) can do modulation. The data in this research were in the form of clauses and sentences with passive voice taken from corpus data. It included 497 news articles from the online news platform ‘GlobalVoices,' which were processed with AntConc 3.5.8 software. The data in this research were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively to achieve broad objectives, depth of understanding, and the corroboration. Meanwhile, the comparative methods were used to analyze both source and target texts. Through the cautious process of collecting and analyzing the data, the results showed that (1) GT (via NMT) was able to translate the English passive voice by distinguishing morphological changes in Indonesian passive voice (2) GT was able to modulate English passive voice into Indonesian base verbs and Indonesian active voice.
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References
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Alwi, H., Dardjowidjojo, S., Lapoliwa, H., & Moeliono, A. (2003). Tata Bahasa Baku Bahasa Indonesia. Jakarta: Balai Pustaka.
Amar, N. (2017). Tingkat Keakuratan Terjemahan Bahasa Inggris ke Bahasa Indonesia oleh Google Translate. Madah: Jurnal Bahasa Dan Sastra, 4(1), 82. https://doi.org/10.31503/madah.v4i1.558
Apandi, A., & Islami, F. (2018). Translation Analysis on Passive Voice from Indonesian into English Found in “Gua Sunyaragi†Book. Academic Journal Perspective : Education, Language, and Literature, 6(2), 110. https://doi.org/10.33603/perspective.v6i2.1576
Bahdanau, D., Cho, K., & Bengio, Y. (2014). Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate. ICLR 2015 as oral presentation Cornel University. arXiv:1409.0473
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
Catford, J. (1965). A Linguistic Theory of Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Garcia, I. (2009). Research on Translation Tools. In A. Pym & A. Perekrestenko, Translation Research Projects 2 (pp. 27–33). Intercultural Studies Group Universitat Rovira i Virgili.
Hacker, D. (2003). A Writer’s Reference (5th ed.). Boston: St. Martin’s.
Hatim, B., & Munday, J. (2004). Translation: An Advanced Resource Book. London: Routledge.
Johnson, R., Onwuegbuzie, A., & Turner, L. (2007). Toward a Definition of Mixed Methods Research. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 1(2), 112–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1558689806298224
Karami, O. (2014). The Brief View on Google Translate Machine. Germany: Seminar in Artificial Intelligence on Natural Language.
Koehn, P. (2020). Neural Machine Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Komeili, Z., Hendavalan, J., Allah F., & Rahimi, A. (2011). An Investigation of the Translation Problems Incurred by English-to-Persian Machine Translations: “Padideh, Pars, and Google Softwares.†Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 28, 1079–1082. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.11.195
Machali, R. (2009). Pedoman Bagi Penerjemah. Bandung: PT. Mizan Pustaka.
Moleong, L. (2001). Metode Penelitian Kualitatif. Bandung: PT. Penerbit Remaja Rosdakarya.
Nassaji, H. (2015). Qualitative and descriptive research: Data type versus data analysis. Language Teaching Research, 19(2), 129–132. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168815572747
Neubig, G., Dou, Z., Hu, J., Michel, P., Pruthi, D., Wang, X., & Wieting, J. (2019). Compare-mt: A Tool for Holistic Comparison of Language Generation Systems. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. arXiv:1903.07926
Newmark, P. (1988). A Textbook of Translation. Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall International vUIO Ltd.
Nida, E., & Taber, C. (1982). The Theory and Practice of Translation (2nd ed.). Leiden: E.J.Brill.
Putranti, A. (2018). Modulation: A Translation Method to Obtain Naturaleness in Target Language Texts. Journal of Language and Literature, 18(1), 98–101. https://doi.org/10.24071/joll.2018.180112
Ramesh, A., Parthasarathy, V., Haque, R., & Way, A. (2021). Comparing Statistical and Neural Machine Translation Performance on Hindi-To-Tamil and English-To-Tamil. Digital, 1(2), 86–102. https://doi.org/10.3390/digital1020007
Scholastica, C. (2018). Learning the English Passive Voice: Difficulties, learning strategies of Igbo ESL learners and pedagogical implications. International Journal of English and Literature, 9(5), 50–62. https://doi.org/10.5897/IJEL2018.1146
Sennrich, R., Haddow, B., & Birch, A. (2015). Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units.
Sianipar, I., & Sajarwa. (2021). The Translation of Indonesian Passive Voice in Research Articles’ Abstracts into English: Human Vs Machine Translation. 15(2). https://doi.org/10.24036/ld.v15i2.112967
Sudaryanto. (1993). Metode dan Aneka Teknik Analisis Bahasa: Pengantar Penelitian Wahana Kebudayaan Secara Linguistis. Yogyakarta: Duta Wacana University Press.
Sun, S. (2014). Professional Translation as New Trend of Translation. International Journal of Linguistics and Communication, 2(2), 63–73.
Sutrisno, A. (2020). The Accuracy and Shortcomings of Google Translate Translating English Sentences to Indonesian. Education Quarterly Reviews, 3(4). https://doi.org/10.31014/aior.1993.03.04.161
Tan, Z., Wang, S., Yang, Z., Chen, G., Huang, X., Sun, M., & Liu, Y. (2020). Neural machine translation: A review of methods, resources, and tools. AI Open, 1, 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aiopen.2020.11.001
Vinay, J., & Darbelnet, J. (1955). Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Published
2021-12-31
How to Cite
MA'SHUMAH, Nadia Khumairo; SIANIPAR, Isra F.; SALSABILA, Cynthia Yanda.
Google Translate Performance in Translating English Passive Voice into Indonesian.
Pioneer: Journal of Language and Literature, [S.l.], v. 13, n. 2, p. 271-287, dec. 2021.
ISSN 2655-8718.
Available at: <https://unars.ac.id/ojs/index.php/pioneer/article/view/1292>. Date accessed: 07 apr. 2025.
doi: https://doi.org/10.36841/pioneer.v13i2.1292.
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