Assessment of Arabic-English translation produced by Google Translate

Abstract

There have been very few research studies conducted on the assessment of Arabic-English translation produced by online Google Translate according to an extensive review of the literature available on this topic to date. The current qualitative study seeks to assess some samples of Arabic-English translation done by Google Translate and measure their accuracy against model translations of these samples provided by Dickins, Hervey and Higgins (2017) to determine if this translation method can be followed or not. The researcher collected the data (texts) from a book entitled Thinking Arabic Translation (Dickins, et al., 2017), fed them into Google Translate and conducted an error analysis to assess the quality of translation produced by Google Translate. The error analysis showed that Google Translate made lexical and syntactic errors which affected the quality of translation and caused the meaning of the translations to be unintelligible. The findings of the study revealed that Google Translate cannot be used as a valid translation tool for Arabic-English translation and that human interference is greatly needed to produce accurate and effective translation. Further research on the assessment of Google Translate in Arabic-English translation is recommended to either support the findings of this study or challenge them.