A Critical Evaluation of Google Translation: The Case of English-Sorani Kurdish Translation.

Google Translate is a machine translation service that is frequently and actively utilized worldwide. Sorani Kurdish, otherwise known as Central Kurdish, was officially added to Google Translate in May 2022. At the outset of the launch of Sorani Kurdish translation services, it is crucial to evaluate the quality of the translation and pave the way for improvements, if necessary. Taking into consideration both linguistic and cultural aspects, this paper aims to critically assess the accuracy of English-Sorani Kurdish translations produced by Google Translate. For this purpose, the paper has adopted a textual analysis approach based on the notion of equivalence to critically analyze samples of translations generated by Google Translate. The results suggest that Google Translate is largely accurate at morphological and syntactic levels but improvements are needed to overcome the minor deficiencies detected in rendering future perfect and perfect progressive tenses, third conditional sentences and passive tenses (especially in the case of progressive and perfect progressive tenses). With regard to the semantic level, Google Translate has proved accurate in processing non-equivalence terms and polysemous words, but it has assumed an utter failure in translating idioms and proverbs. With regard to the cultural level, in over third-fourths of instances, Google Translate renders English cultural terms into Sorani Kurdish accurately, whereas in nearly one-fourth of instances, it offers inappropriate translation. As far as English into Sorani Kurdish translation is concerned, Google Translate can be deemed effective as a supportive translation tool but it is far from being perfect, and continuous improvements will be needed to respond to the errors and deficiencies unearthed in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]