Tamil–English Machine Translation

This chapter explores the understudied challenges of Tamil–English machine translation (MT), which is a field where most existing scholarship has focused on Western language pairs. It performs a comparative analysis of published translations of acclaimed Tamil authors such as Perumal Murugan, Ashokamitran, Jeyamohan, and Charu Nivedita with AI-generated translations produced by systems including ChatGPT, Grok, and AI Novel Translation. It explores issues of accuracy, fidelity, style, and cultural nuance. By examining how AI tools interpret and reproduce linguistic choices, syntax, and cultural particularities, it evaluates the extent to which AI can approximate human translation and highlights the role of post-editing in bridging gaps. The analysis not only identifies recurring errors but also suggests methods for refining human and AI translations for Tamil literary texts.