An Investigation into Google Translates Translation of English Proverbs into Vietnamese

When learning English, once in a while, learners may need help to cope with English proverbs, and the dictionary may not help them explain the proverbs’ meaning. Then, it leads them to find Google Translate (GT) as a safe place to help translate proverbs. The present study attempts to discover how GT renders English proverbs into Vietnamese. To have the data for the study, the author adopted 17 proverbs from an educational website full of explanations of such proverbs. The data was collected in about 45 minutes from the GT translation platform. The results revealed that GT could translate all the words in each proverb and put them in acceptable Vietnamese structures. However, GT needs to provide Vietnamese readers with the intended meaning of the proverbs, which is to give advice to people on work and work effort. The study also includes some limitations for further study