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Machine Translation and Yorùbá: Matters Arising
(University of Lagos Press and Bookshop Limited, 2020) Eleshin, A.
The art of translation as an academic discipline was developed over a couple of centuries ago. The relationship between two or more societies and cultures has necessitated the essence of translation. In the mid-twentieth century,machine translation, which is a section of computer-aided translation,was introduced as a form of artificial intelligence in translation studies for the alignment of the source text and target text pairs (Munday,2001).In order to ease the means and methods of translation in the global world and to meet up with the requirement of artificial intelligence, the use of machine translation was validated.This study analyses the form and methods of machine translation with Yorùbá as either the source text or the target text.It has been realized that various inadequacies and inconsistencies exist in the process of translating text to/from Yorùbá.In this study, I have identified three major factors responsible for the inadequacies,namely: (1) linguistic/sociolinguistic; (2)stylistic;and (3) sociocultural. The communicative competence model of language analysis is employed to see if the linguistic approach is capable of proffering solutions to the problems identified above. It is believed that this approach will help validate the process of translating the Yorùbá language appropriately in an automated circumstance.