Machine Translation and Poetry. The Case of English and Portuguese

Abstract This article sets out to analyse the translations into Portuguese of three poems written I English, “A Letter is a Joy of Earth” by Emily Dickinson, “To a Stranger” by Walt Whitman and “Sandra” by Charles Bukowski. Three translations by three human translators, Geir Campos, Pedro Gonzaga and Jorge de Sena, are compared to the translations made by Google Translate in order to evaluate machine translation quality. This research shows that machine translations are less “ludicrous” than some would think and are in fact quite acceptable. In the cases investigated, machine t...