Pragmatic and Cultural Preservation Analysis of English and Indonesian Idiom Translation Using AI Machine Translation

Abstract

Translation becomes a crucial part of learning and understanding a new language. This research attempted to examine the efficacy of AI machine translators QuillBot and Google Translate in addressing pragmatic and cultural meaning in the transcription of idioms between English and Indonesian. An idiom could be misinterpreted by human beings because it does not carry the literal meaning; this research aims to uncover a significant challenge of AI in translating the idiom. This research used a qualitative method with a descriptive analysis approach.  The findings of this research uncover that an advanced AI machine still cannot replace the implicature of human translation. Moreover, this research contributes to language learning by highlighting the limitations of machine translation, deepening the understanding of the role of pragmatics, cultural value equivalences, and raising awareness of the nuances in language that cannot be accurately interpreted by AI.