A comparative study on translation of homonyms done by translation machines (A Case study of Google Translate and I’m translator websites)

Machine translation is a challenging and yet increasingly growing issue in the field of translation studies. Machine translation could be dug from different facets, from syntactic point of view to vocabulary and function. One interesting area of investigation is the way that translating machines treat words with special semantic features. One of the most challenging tasks, even for human translators, is translating homonyms, the words with more than one meaning, since their translation requires translators to have thorough knowledge about words’ different and the ability to decide for selecting the proper meaning that fits within that certain context. The present paper is a comparative study on the translation of homonyms in 2 on line translating machines from English language to Persian. The aim of this study is to find out whether or not these translating machines can translate homonyms and apply the most suitable meaning in the translation and to clarify which translation machine is performing better in translation of homonyms and whether or not there is a difference in translation of homonyms when English is the source language and Persian is the target language.