Literal or Literary Machine Translation? Case Study: Winnie-The-Pooh

Despite its widespread commercial use, machine translation has been sparsely employed on literary works, especially on children’s literature. This study focuses on reader comprehension of a chapter from Winnie-the-Pooh translated from English into Romanian using DeepL. Machine translation evaluation should focus not only on fluency and adequacy, but also on how readers perceive the target text. Twenty-five participants have annotated the passages that were difficult to understand and those that were logical but contained grammatical or stylistic errors. The survey ended with three comprehensibility and three MT user opinion questions.