Register in the Machine Translation and Human Translation: The Case of Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole

The present case study aims to compare human translators and machine translation engines to determine the differences in transferring the register of the original text. Khaksar and Sohrabi as human translators are selected to be compared to Google and Targoman as translation machines. Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole is selected to contain the data samples. The method is descriptive qualitative, and quantitative analysis is used to quantify the qualitative data. To deal with the concept of register, Halliday's register theory in systemic functional linguistics is used which mainly considers register as a concept for investigating the contextual factors that consist of three dimensions: field, tenor, and mode. The products of the four translators are analyzed and compared based on the Hallidayan register. The results demonstrate that humans have been able to transfer the register of the selected samples with higher quality than the machines. However, the difference in transferring the three dimensions of the register by each translator implies that there are similarities between the humans and the machines when transferring the dimensions of the register is considered since the distribution of problematic items among the dimensions of the register is extremely similar for all translators.