Abstract
The number of Free Online Machine Translation (FOMT) users witnessed a spectacular growth since 1994. FOMT systems change the aspects of machine translation (MT) and the mass translated materials using a wide range of natural languages and machine translation systems. Hundreds of millions of people use these FOMT systems to translate the holy Quran (Al-Qur?an) verses from the Arabic language to other natural languages, and vice versa. In this study, an automatic evaluation for the use of FOMT systems to translate Arabic Quranic text into English is conducted. The two well-known FOMT systems (Google and Bing Translators) are chosen to be evaluated in this study using a metric called Assessment of Text Essential Characteristics (ATEC). ATEC metric is one of the automatic evaluation metrics for machine translation systems. ATEC scores the correlation between the output of a machine translation system and professional human reference translation based on word choice, word orders and the similarity between MT output and the human reference translation. Extensive evaluation has been conducted on two well-known FOMT systems to translate Arabic Quranic text into English. This evaluation shows that Google translator performs better than Bing translator in translating Quranic text. It is noticed that the average ATEC score does not exceed 41% which indicates that FOMT systems are ineffective in translating Quranic texts accurately
Highlights
The Arabic word "Quran", "Quran" or "(Al-Qurān)" means literally "the recitation"
To extensively evaluate the quality of Free Online Machine Translation (FOMT) systems in translating Quranic text, the experiments were conducted on four chapters
Average Assessment of Text Essential Characteristics (ATEC) score is produced by computing the average of ATEC score of all verses in each chapter for each FOMT system)
Summary
The holy Quran is considered by Muslims around the world as the verbatim word of God (Allah) dictated by Allah through the archangel Gabriel (Jibrīl) to the Prophet Muhammad. Quran is divided into 114 Sûrats (chapters). Each Sûrat consists of several number āyāts (verses). The length of these Sûrats varies considerably, where Sûrat length is measured in the number of āyāts that it has and that varies from few āyāts (verses) as in the first Sûra (AlFatiha) which consists of seven verses only to hundreds of āyāts within the same Quranic Sûrats such as the second Sûra (Al-Baqarah) that consists of 286 verses. The total number of Quranic verses is 6,236 [1,2,3,4]
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