Translation Quality Assessment of Online Translation Systems in Translating English to Thai on Phuket Tourism

This research aims to compare four English-to-Thai translator applications on translating the comments posted on social media. Four translator applications include Google Translate, Baidu Translate, Yandex.Translate and Microsoft/Bing Translate. The comments in this study are on three main popular attractions in Phuket, Thailand. The attractions include a temple (Wat Chalong), a viewpoint spot (Promthep Cape) and a beach (Patong beach). Fifty comments on each attraction are collected from GoogleReviews and TripAdvisor. The total of 300 comments are translated by four translators making the final translated comments of 1,200 comments. All translated comments are evaluated by three language experts on three categories including the grammar structure, the vocabulary and idiom and the overall translation. The evaluation results show that Google Translate is found to be the most suitable translator for translating English comments to Thai comments in this study at 89.33%. Google Translate receives the average suitable score of 4.20 out of 5.00. However, Google Translate is weak at word choices to generate a beautiful sentence. Baidu Translate is very superb at generating a beautiful sentence similar to human languages. However, Baidu Translate only gets a good result on a specific domain or situation. As a result, Baidu Translate is lost to Google Translate in most cases. Even though this research presents the results on Thai language and specific domains, the techniques used in this study can be applied to any language on any domain.