A Thorough Assessment of Google Translate’s Central Kurdish English Translation: Accuracy, Linguistic Features, and Challenges

Abstract

Enhancing machine translation systems for Kurdish language, notably for Central Kurdish is significant through offering insights into specific difficulties and targeted suggestions for improvements. Hence, the study aims to thoroughly assess the accuracy of Google Translate in translation of Central Kurdish to English. The study focuses on linguistic features and the challenges confronted during the process of translation. The study also seeks to analyze the linguistic elements and identifying errors in grammatical, syntactic, semantic, stylistic nuances and the difficulties faced in translation. To achieve this, the study employs as a qualitative research design and textual analysis. Likewise, the study applies the (Costa et al., 2015) methodology to assess linguistic errors in the aforementioned linguistic features. In this sense, the research article utilizes eight randomly selected reports from both Rudaw and K24 satellite media sources from various types of texts.  The results showed that Google Translate normally struggles with grammatical, semantic, stylistic and cultural complexities inherent in Kurdish language. Significant mistranslations, omissions, and syntactic wider field of machine translation, focusing on the necessities required for improving underrepresented languages.