Machine Translation and Skopos Theory: Post-modernist Approach to Interlingual Translation

Translation, as an international channel of communication between different nations, should not be regarded as a simple matter, but should be contextualized as a multi-dimensional system of interconnected networks. Machine translation (MT), a modern and commercial approach to interlingual translation, has placed translators at the fingertips of the people who need quick and low-cost translations, but at the expense of appropriateness of the output. The commissioner and the translator, who determine the skopos and dimensions of adequacy according to the translation commission, play a pivotal role in the translation process. The purpose of this study is to show the efficiency of MT according to modern and capitalistic world's needs and expectations which influences the translation commissions in the movie industry. To this end, the English version of nine movies are sampled, and the Persian translations of certain parts of these movies, provided by MT, are selected and closely compared with the appropriate use of equivalents within the context of the movies. After data analysis, the appropriateness and accuracy of the translations will be discussed in terms of relativity and context dependence of the choice of translation strategy.