La traducción automática y la voz pasiva: ¿Qué son capaces de hacer Google Translate y DeepL en la traducción del castellano al alemán? Un estudio comparativo de textos periodísticos
Machine Translation and Passive Voice: What are Google Translate and DeepL Capable of in Translating from Spanish into German? A Comparative Study of Journalistic Texts

Summary/Abstract: Depending on the subject matter and the type of text, machine translators can sometimes provide high-quality translations. This study examines Google Translate and DeepL translations of the passive voice from Spanish into German in journalistic texts from the Culture section of two daily newspapers. Our aim is to analyze whether the above-mentioned machine translators are able to distance themselves from the source text (st) and adapt textual conventions of the target culture in the translations. Nord (1997, 2005, 2016, 2018) distinguishes between documentary translations and instrumental translations: the former reflect syntactic, lexical and morphological features of the source text in the target text (tt) while instrumental translations adapt to the textual conventions and syntactic, lexical and morphological features of the target culture. For our quantitative study we used the Sketch Engine soft ware and analyzed how Google Translate and DeepL translated the passive voice in news articles about works of art in the Spanish newspapers La Razón and El Mundo, which focus on culture, and whether they used the passive voice more in German than in Spanish. In this way, we extend our study started in 2023, in which we analyzed the use of the passive voice in machine translations by DeepL and Google Translate of journalistic texts on economics from El País, El Mundo, rtve and El Diario (Limbach 2024: 178-201). The second objective of our study is to compare our results with those of the previous study. The current results show that both machine translators have used multiple resources to translate the passive voice from Spanish into German and have even used the passive in German when the active had been used in Spanish, thus showing that they are able to distance themselves from the st and comply with the respective textual conventions of the target culture. By comparing the results of both our studies, we can reconfirm our previous conclusions.

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