THOMAS RASAQ AINA

Foreign Languages

At the Foreign Languages department office

Appointment on Visitation important

Topic: Translation Quality Assessment (TQA)

Description: My research interest focuses on a comparative, analytical and empirical evaluation of typology of texts translated by Human/Machine and to juxtapose them with the original texts (reference translation) with a view to determining the performance index and quality of both translations .  There is a corpus for experiment and analysis which will include source texts (pragmatic, technical, and literary), their human and machine translation equivalent. For the purpose of comparative evaluation of performance index and quality of human/machine translations, I have chosen Google Translate as a model of machine translation tool to translate original texts of natural languages and their comparison to the ones done by a human translator expert. By way of comparison, this exercise will ascertain the success and failure rates of machine translation ( Google Translate) as well as its capacity to provide coherence, contextual or situational and equivalent meaning - salient features in translation studies. This study is inspired by the general perception, non empirical criticisms and affirmations about the 'performance' and 'incomprehensibility' of the output of machine translation of natural languages. Stake holders (authors, translators, and target audience) in translation activity have argued that machine lacks the capacity to think and by extension translate intelligibly, coherently and meaningfully. Their argument is plausible in view of the fact that translation is structural, contextual and cognitive. In order to react to these two dissenting views about the capacity of computer to translate, I have , through a questionnaire raised some hypothetical questions which will serve as a guide in the course of this research.

#	Certificate	School	Year
1.	Ph.D (Translation Studies)	Department of Foreign Languages, Lagos State University, Ojo	2019

A PhD Research: (Quality Assessment in Human/Google Translation)

Machine Translation (MT) is increasingly developing and it has become a veritable tool for the translation of texts from one language to another. Google Translate (GT), a free web-based translation application- automation has made it possible for every language user to effect translation exercise with a degree of sophistication, accuracy, speed and minimum effort. However, Google Translate is conjecturally and heavily criticized by the major stake holders (author, translator and target audience) in translation activity for being unintelligible, inaccurate, and contextually incoherent. This empirical research therefore analyses, evaluates, and compares the quality of translations (accuracy, comprehensibility, equivalence) and incongruities of Google Translate English-to-French with Human Expert Translations (HET) using a heterogeneous based corpus. The corpus adopted is a collection of texts excerpts ranging from politics, diplomacy, justice, health, literary and religion

THOMAS RASAQ is a Lecturer I at the Department of Foreign Languages

THOMAS has a Ph.D in Translation Studies from Department of Foreign Languages, Lagos State University, Ojo