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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23, No. 0, pp.204-219
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Jan 2023
Received 27 Feb 2023 Revised 15 Mar 2023 Accepted 22 Mar 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202303.204

Human Interpretation and Machine Translations Based upon Interviews with Director Joon-ho Bong

Jeong-Hwa Lee ; Kyung-Whan Cha
(1st author) Visiting Professor, Dept. of Liberal Arts, Dankook University, Tel: 02-3392-1009 2019jhlee@naver.com
(corresponding author) Professor, Dept. of English Education, Chung-Ang University, Tel: 02-820-5395 kwcha@cau.ac.kr


© 2023 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The study investigated differences in human interpretation and machine translation in Korean interviews of director Joon-Ho Bong. English content for Bong’s Korean interviews was taken from interpretations by Sharon Choi, Google Translator and Papago Translator. The analyzed corpus data included 669 different English syntaxes (223 sentences uttered by Sharon Choi, 223 Google English translations, and 223 Papago English translations) in total gleaned from six videos publicly shared on YouTube. Of 223 sentences, 207 (92.8%) were correctly translated by Choi compared to 166 (74.4%) rendered by Google Translator and 167 (74.9%) correct translations by Papago Translator is expected that Ms. Choi would have a challenging assignment with a considerable risk of real-time interpretation errors. Contrary to common predictions, the results suggest that human interpretation to appropriate word choices and grammar continues to be more accurately applied than the translation of the two machine translators. The AI programs committed translation errors in word choices because they had difficulty recognizing the subtle colloquialism, fragments, and run on sentences that are commonly present in spoken language.

Keywords:

interviews with Joon-ho Bong, Sharon Choi, human interpretation, machine translation, Google translation, Papago translation, real time language

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