The Challenges of Using Machine Translation in Rendering Arabic Texts into English

Applied Perspective

Abstract

Regardless of recent arguments about the wide-scale capabilities of artificial intelligence introduced into machine translation systems, some professionals still underestimate machine translation. However, other scholars see MT as an opportunity to develop and improve the translation industry. Apparently, there is no doubt that machine translation has massively impacted the translation profession and changed radically the way human beings interact through languages. Therefore, translators, university professors, and translation companies seek to adapt to these radical transformations in the field of translation studies. Regardless of the advantages of machine translation, it still confronts huge challenges especially when MT strategies and procedures are applied to specific texts in different contexts particularly colloquial Arabic extensively proliferated in contemporary literature and mass media.  On this basis and in response to repeated claims about the high efficiency of machine translation and its extra-ordinary potentialities to render any text from one language into another with accuracy and precision, this paper emphasizes the inability of machine translation mechanisms to render Arabic texts into English and vice versa. The paper emphasizes the damaging impact of using machine translation in rendering into English not only colloquial Arabic dialects but also modern standard Arabic (MSA). The paper also underlines the translation errors resulting from the use of machine translation in rendering modern English texts into Arabic and vice versa with focus on the translation of idiomatic expressions and proverbs. As applied study, the paper will use a variety of texts selected from various literary and non-literary sources/contexts and translate them by “Google Translate” to underline the drawbacks of MT, which subsequently lead to the distortion of the meaning of the SL texts translated into TL. In other words, the paper aims to uncover the mistakes resulting from the use of machine translation when converting both MSA and colloquial Arabic expressions into English and vice versa. The argument of the paper consists of four parts including an introduction, which navigates contemporary translation theories, followed by a scrutiny of the challenges confronting Arabic-English translation, and examples of Arabic/English/Arabic carried out by machine and human translation in addition to a conclusion.