Translating Idioms & Some Arabic Proverbs: Human Vs. Machine Translation

Abstract

This study compares Human to Machine Translation of idioms. It also aims to specify the translation methods used by Ss in translating idioms in comparison to those utilized by MT. In addition, it attempts to identify the difficulties that Ss face when translating idioms. This research is descriptive. A test was given to 20 students of the third and fourth level who have been selected randomly. They have been subjected to a test of idiom translations from Arabic into English. On the other hand, to five free, online machine translators that provide Arabic-English translation and vice versa. These websites are: Google Translate, Reverso Translation, Yandex Translator, Box Dictionary, and U Dictionary. The translations were corrected, marked and analyzed. Based on the analysis, it is found that human translation performance is better than that of machine translation. Human translations have got an Acceptable rate of performance in comparison to the Unacceptable rate of MT. Besides, human translation provides a more semantic translation while MT provides more literal translation. In addition to that, the semantic method is the most translation method utilized by human, while translating idioms, followed by literal while it is the opposite in the case of the machine translation. Results show that (Google Translation, Yandex and Box dictionary) have provided unacceptable translation (60%). However, (Reverso and U Dictionary) have provided acceptable translation with a percentage of 40%. It is recommended to give special attention and effective teaching translation to translation strategies and procedures, particularly those related to rendering idiomatic and fixed expressions. MT developers should also update the MT engines in relation to the IT development and make use of the researches in compu-linguistics