THREE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE THIRD CODE N TRANSLATIONS OF THE MTS ERA: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

The relevance of this study is determined by the widespread use of machine translation systems (MTS) in professional translation practice and the lack of research focused on identifying manifestations of the third code in German-Ukrainian translation that may originate from these systems. The third code is understood as a special type of language that exists at the boundary between source and target languages and is associated with literal translation, constructions unnatural for the target language, and disregard for usage norms. The aim of the study is to identify and describe manifestations of the third code relevant to German-Ukrainian translation, to conduct a quantitative comparison of third code manifestations in the empirical materials, and to to identify natural alternatives. The empirical material consists of four texts: F. Kafka’s novel «Der Prozess» (1925), the Ukrainian translation «Процес» by P. Tarashchuk (1998), the Ukrainian translation by the MTS DeepL (2025), and the Ukrainian translation produced by a translator with one year of experience using the MTS DeepL (2025). To ensure the validity of the results, we conducted a blind case study in which the participant initially did not know the true purpose of the translation. The study analyzed three manifestations of the third code: tag questions, the implicit pronoun «це» in the construction «робити + це», and inappropriate adoption of possessive pronouns. The results of the quantitative comparison confirmed the heuristic hypothesis: the translation produced with the aid of MTS contains a significantly higher number of third code manifestations. In addition, we identified the main strategies through which the translation produced before the emergence and spread of MTS contained fewer manifestations of the third code. The high degree of convergence between decisions in the MTS translation and the translation produced with MTS assistance indicates uncritical attitude toward MTS suggestions. This fact also demonstrates the risk of adopting unnatural variants when acceptable alternatives exist. The results of this case study can serve as a foundation for further corpus-based research aimed at verifying the identified trends. Moreover, the prospect of further research lies in the identification and description of other manifestations of the third code in the German-Ukrainian direction