Natalia A. Basilaia

The aim of the given research is to implement a contrastivecomparative analysis of human and machine translations based on the material of the twenty-seventh chapter of the autobiographic work “Coffee and Cigarettes” by the famous modern German writer Ferdinand von Schirach. The machine translation has been carried out at the Laboratory of Digital Philology of the Chair of the Russian Language of Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. The human translation has been made by a multilingual international group of MA students at the above-mentioned Chair. With the aim of visualization of invariance of the translations, the method of graphic structuring of the text has been used. The text has been divided into blocks, each containing a line of the initial text, its human and machine translations into Russian and Georgian languages, and the transliteration of the Georgian translation.

The usage of blocks while working on the translation of concrete texts in a multilingual group enables the teacher to identify the similarities and differences between lexical units, grammatical phenomena, as well as stylistic and semantic nuances on each language level. The similarities and differences are revealed not only with regard to the original and target languages but also between the contrasted target languages, one of which performs the function of an intermediary/supplementary language. Hence, it may be concluded that all the distortions of the literary text during machine translation prove the existence of certain problems: on the one hand, it is necessary to tune the computer to the style of the writer and make it “feel” all the sentiments discussed in the given paper. These issues are analyzed in the course of lectures “Preparation for Literary Translation” at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. On the other hand, it is necessary to “teach” the computer how to deal with the multi-layered differences between the original and the target languages.