The Impact of Google Translate Syntactic Strategies on Translation Quality: Translating Journal Articles from Indonesian to English

Abstract

The prevalent use of Google Translate as a tool for academic translations, despite concerns regarding its quality, frames the core issue of this research. This research aims to classify syntactic strategies used by Google Translate in translating from Indonesia to English. It also aims to analyze the quality of the translation produced and how the syntactic strategies affected the translation quality. The data were collected from a journal article entitled “Pengaruh Bahasa Indonesia dan Bahasa Inggris sebagai Bahasa Pengantar dalam Pendidikan Formal” which was presented using a descriptive qualitative method. The findings of this research reveal there are several types of different syntactic strategies used by Google Translate. The result of this research shows that, out of 273 data collected, there are 123 (45.05%) data of literal translation, 2 (0.73%) data of loan and calque, 53 (19.41%) of transposition, 17 (6.23%) data of unit shift, 45 (16.48%) data of phrase structure change, 1 (0.37%) data of clause structure change, 18 (6.59%) data of sentence structure change, 1 (0.37%) data of cohesion change, 13 (4.76%) data of level shift, and no data found for scheme change. In addition, there are several different classifications found for translation quality. Out of 194 data analyzed, the results show that 163 (84.02%) data are accurate, 30 (15.46%) data are less accurate, and 1 (0.52%) data is not accurate. For acceptability, there are 179 (92.27%) acceptable, 14 (7.22%) data are less accurate, and 2 (1.03%) data are not acceptable. Finally, there are 180 (92.78%) data with high readability, 15 (7.73%) data are medium readability, and no data found for low readability.