quality assessment of translation as a means of intercultural communication: agha'zadeh’s official account’s instagram posts in focus

This paper aims at contributing to the existing debate about translation’s quality assessment in online social media (osm). in so doing, it pays particular attention to instagram as an instance of free online social media platforms, which is widely used in iran for the dissemination of information and intercultural communication. adopting koponen’s (2010) manual error analysis method for assessing the quality of machine translation, it evaluates the persian-into-english translation performance of instagram translate, and compares it with that of a professional human translator. to this end, the photo and video captions of official instagram account’s posts of agha'zadeh, a persian social and political series, were selected and analyzed at the sentence level. the rationale behind selecting this series was that it is popular among iranians, has an english subtitle, and represents the iranian film producers’ attempts at publicizing the series. as it could be expected, the study showed that the human translator produced more accurate and comprehensible translations especially if the posts contained cultural elements. it also revealed that typical translation errors of instagram translate were untranslated items, omission, mistranslation, and errors related to the relations between concepts. however, the human translator’s errors were mainly of substitution and explication type. the results recommend instagram translate as an assistive tool for overcoming communication barriers in an international setting and publicizing persian series globally. they pinpoint that the machine may produce more accurate and comprehensible english translations if promotional persian captions are written with full awareness of its common translation errors, and the writers follow the tips the paper provides which could help avoid them. hence, the country’s cultural products may reach a wider international public.