Readability and Communication in Machine Translation of Arabic Phraseologisms into Spanish

Abstract

AbstractEven though translation from Arabic into Spanish is far from the accuracy level achieved for other language pairs such as English/Spanish, considerable progress has been made in machine translation from Arabic into other languages [1, 2, 4, 45]. From this perspective, this research aims to assess how Arabic proverbs are translated into Spanish by three machine translation tools - Google Translate, Reverso Context, and Tradukka – in order to determine the translation’s quality, and measure their accuracy, as well as the tools’ ability to recognize said proverbs as independent semantic linguistic units. To this end, we have used twenty Fusha Arabic proverbs: three that have no Spanish equivalent; six that also exist in Spanish; three that bear certain resemblance to existing Spanish proverbs; and eight that possess functional equivalents in Spanish. The study concludes that the machine translation tools tested present a low accuracy level, requiring post-editing by a human translator. They make errors rendering Arabic proverbs that it is possible to translate verbatim as they also exist in Spanish and do not recognize proverbs as independent phraseological units when translating proverbs in context, with few exceptions in the case of Reverso Context.KeywordsProverbsArabicSpanishMachine translation