Treatment of anglicisms in Spanish-English machine translations

Abstract

Developments in machine translation engines have shown that a high degree of accuracy can be reached automatically, as long as there is a large pool of source and target texts from which the tool can " learn". Conveying denotative meaning entails little difficulty for computer programmes or human translators alike. It is when utterances hide connotative meaning that translation problems arise. Studies show that, outside technical languages, pragmatics is often behind the users' choice of Anglicisms. Our objective is to examine if the intention of writers who include Anglicisms in source texts in Spanish is maintained in target texts in English, which are provided by the automatic translation tool Deepl.