Investigating Machine Translation Errors in Rendering English Literary Texts into Arabic

Abstract

Machine translation is a machine that employs artificial intelligence (AI) to translate texts between languages without human intervention. Machine translation approaches translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic issues of both different languages. The present study aims to analyze the translation of literary texts selected from different novels, plays, and poems and clarify the method for translating them from English into Arabic. This study also aims to discover machine translation errors in rendering English literary texts and clarify the translator's role in transferring the rhetorical impact on the reader who reads the (TT). This study hypothesizes that translators(students) face difficulties regarding words and structures when translating literary texts from English into Arabic because they misunderstand rhetorical devices. So they tend to use machine translations that translate literally, such as (Google Translate, Reverso translation and Bing Microsoft translation). This study adopted two models: First, Newmark's translation model (1988b), which includes two basic types of translation: semantic and communicative. This model is used widely in the analysis of literary texts. Second, Harris (2018) linguistic model theory of rhetorical question and the general purpose of the rhetorical devices to analyze the data. Finally, the study ends with the conclusions that all machine translation programs (Google Translate (GT), Reverso Translation (Reverso. T), Bing Microsoft Translation (Bing. M.T) in rendering English literary texts from English into Arabic are unacceptable and have more problems because these programs are just machines and cannot think or feel as well as all these machines renderings are meaningless and ambiguous. So Human translation is better than Machine Translation because the first uses communicative translation while the other uses semantic translation.