Search

Translating medical terminologies from English into Arabic poses a challenge that usually directly impacts precision and efficiency in medical communication and, hence, the treatment of patients. This paper aims to explore terminology inconsistencies in medical translation and propose methods to enhance accuracy and consistency, thereby addressing a research gap that ultimately impacts healthcare delivery. It addresses research questions regarding common medical inconsistencies in English-to-Arabic translation, their impact on patients as perceived by healthcare professionals, and the tools and strategies employed by medical translators to ensure accuracy. The study is both quantitative and qualitative in nature. In the qualitative part, 100 medical terms were given to 10 medical translators. Out of 100 terms, the study qualitatively analyses 10 translated terms with high inconsistency. The data were classified according to subjects such as ambiguity in the source terminology, variability in translator proficiency, and cultural factors impacting translation. The thematic categorisation of the responses provides an analysis of the main factors contributing to terminological inconsistencies and the challenges faced when translating medical terminology across various specialties. Additionally, two open-ended surveys were disseminated, one involving 50 medical translators and 50 medical specialists in the quantitative part. The respondents' feedback was analysed to determine the types of errors, their impact on patient clinical outcomes, and the effectiveness of translation processes and tools. The study found that an overwhelming majority of doctors (80%) and nurses (75%) constantly come across examples of translation errors. Medical translators pointed out the complexity of medical vocabulary and professional development in developing continuous improvement. The impact on patient care was significant. Examples given in the findings included poorly understood terms such as 'hypertension', 'myocardial infarction', and 'cerebrovascular accident'. Other strategies identified to review and eliminate errors were translation tools, quality control by peer and cadre support, and continuing education. Cultural differences and localisation were cited as influential in delivering accurate translations. The implications of this research are significant for medical translators, healthcare professionals, and patients. Since there will be an improvement in the quality of translation practices, the accuracy of the communication is more likely to improve. Hence, there will be health-related outcomes for patients and seekers of health information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translation debates have continued to be passionately argued. The study of the connection between philosophy and translation on the one hand and ambiguity in translation on the other hand have both been growing. The connection between philosophy and translation is unavoidable and inevitable. Notwithstanding, philosophers have not tackled the question of translation directly; translation in general has been tackled indirectly by some philosophers. Ambiguity in translation is a fertile field to investigate. Translation of some written sentences is problematic since they are translated from different contexts in culture. This paper aims to (1) study the connection between philosophy and translation on the one hand, and then (2) connect the philosophical interpretation of ambiguous sentences and their effect on the translation from English into Arabic. This paper also aims at (3) discussing the question that is hissing in the translator's mind in order to translate an ambiguous sentence: whether to lean on syntactic or semantic dis-ambiguation. As a result, this paper hypothesizes that lexemes meaning, interpretation, and thus translation is not only sentence bound but clear cotext and context bound. Therefore, to test this hypothesis, in my research, the study selects some sentences from some research and dictionaries which are believed to be ambiguous. The examples I have selected may not cover all ambiguous English sentences, for ambiguous sentences are still turning up, however, I have tried to cover frequently used sentences. I will look at some common difficulties in the interpretation of lexical items. Then, the ambiguity of these sentences will be removed by using these sentences with the same ambiguous lexemes in clear cotext and context. After removing the ambiguity, the sentences will be translated into Arabic to show the impact of both cotext and context on translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to study to what extent we can read as 'feminist' the translation strategies used by translator Nour El-Assaad to produce the Arabic version of Joumana Haddad's book I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman, originally written in English. The feminist translation approaches practiced in Quebec during the 1980s and 1990s worked to shed light on the ways in which translation can transfer and foreground the feminist voice and ideology within the specific geographical scope of that time. This paper thus revisits earlier paradigms and strategies, such as supplementing and hijacking, developed by Canadian feminist translators and writers, namely Luise von Flotow (1991/1997), Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood (1990) and Sherry Simon (1996), in order to study their resonance with the translation of feminist texts produced in the Arabic-speaking context. Since these approaches have never been applied in the context of the Arab world and specifically in Lebanon, this paper opens more discussion on the politics of feminist texts crossing different borders and cultures via translation. It shows how El-Assaad's interventions and strategies reshape the Arabic version of the book so that the force of Haddad's feminist message is amplified in some places and mitigated in others. However, further research is needed to investigate more questions such as the effect of the understanding of Arab feminism(s) and the translator's ideology on the translation of feminist texts produced in the Arab world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Adab Al-Kufa is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Arabic is a language with rich morphology and few resources. Arabic is therefore recognized as one of the most challenging languages for machine translation. The study of translation into Arabic has received significantly less attention than that of European languages. Consequently, further research into Arabic machine translation quality needs more investigation. This paper proposes a translation model between Arabic and English based on Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The proposed model employs a transformer with multi-head attention. It combines a feed-forward network with a multi-head attention mechanism. The NMT proposed model has demonstrated its effectiveness in improving translation by achieving an impressive accuracy of 97.68%, a loss of 0.0778, and a near-perfect Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score of 99.95. Future work will focus on exploring more effective ways of addressing the evaluation and quality estimation of NMT for low-data resource languages, which are often challenging as a result of the scarcity of reference translations and human annotators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine Translation (MT) has the potential to provide instant translation in times of crisis. MT provides real solutions that can remove borders between people and COVID-19 information. The widespread of MT system makes it worthy of scrutinizing the capacity of the most prominent MT system, Google Translate, to deal with COVID-19 texts into Arabic. The study adopted (Costa et al., 2015a) framework in analysing the output of Google Translate output service in terms of orography, grammar, lexis, and semantics. The study’s corpus was extracted from World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). The paper reveals that Google Translate committed a set of errors: semantic, grammatical, lexical, and punctuation. Such errors inhibit the intelligibility of the translated texts. It also indicates that MT might work as an aid to translate general information about COVID-19, but it is still incapable of dealing with critical information about COVID-19. The paper concludes that MT can be an effective tool, but it can never replace human translators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates explicitation techniques employed while translating from English into Arabic. Though extensive research has been done on explicitation in literary texts, investigating the same phenomenon with regard to translating official, institutional documents was only scant. As a result, the question that still lingers is whether translators can use explicitation as readily in official documents as they do in literary texts, or they become too wary. For this reason, the researcher has chosen for discussion an official document; namely, the translation of the English-language "Policies and Procedures Manual for Support Staff" (Office of Human Resources, the American University in Cairo, April 2012) (21,937 words) into Arabic. Invoking Klaudy & Karoly's (2003) framework, the researcher has devised an eclectic 10-tool explicitation framework as the research method to be used. One of the aims of this paper is to give corroborating evidence of explicitation as a required technique used in the different language systems of English and Arabic. Another goal of this paper is to draw a clearer demarcation line between what the researcher calls 'positive (i.e. necessary) explicitation' and 'negative (i.e. redundant) explicitation. It has been shown that 'Explicative Paraphrase' is the most frequently used explicitation shift, followed by 'Conjunction' and 'Reference'. Other shifts came in descending order. The paper has proved that explicitation does not necessarily lead to longer translations. It is recommended that future research could apply this proposed framework to translated texts other than official documents, i.e. literary works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has as its main goal investigating the errors and non-errors made by three machine translation (MT) systems in translating gender-bound constructs from English to Arabic in four selected technical texts. The three MT systems used in this study were Systran’s Pure Neural Machine Translation (PNMT), Google Translate (GT) and Microsoft Bing (MB). The target gender-bound constructs were subject-verb agreement, adjectival-noun agreement and pronoun-antecedent agreement, which occurred naturally in four purposefully selected technical texts. The idea behind the choice of technical texts was to reduce the linguistic load found in other genres, such as literary texts, which involve utilising creative linguistic tools that are out of the scope of the present paper. Upon the qualitative examination of the target language texts, the findings revealed that the three MT systems had errors and non-errors in rendering gender-bound constructs from English to Arabic, and that errors transpired in certain co-textual environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expressions of impossibility refer to events that can never or rarely happen, tasks that are difficult or impossible to perform, people or things that are of no use and things that are impossible to find. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic expressions of impossibility, and the difficulties that student-translators have with them. A corpus of English and Arabic expressions of impossibility was collected, analyzed and compared. Data analysis showed that English and Arabic expressions of impossibility fall into 4 categories: (i) those that are identical in form and meaning in both languages (to look for a needle in a haystack, when salt blossoms, when heaven falls on earth); (ii) those that are similar in meaning but differ in wording (when pigs fly, on cloud nine, not in a million years); (iii) those used in English, but have no equivalents in Arabic (when hell freezes over, dance on a land mine); and (iv) those used in Arabic but have no equivalents in English (الظهر عز في النجوم يريه to show someone the stars at noon/in daylight). Responses to a translation test showed that student-translators could translate fewer than 35% of the test items correctly and left many blank. Expressions of impossibility that are similar in English and Arabic were easy to translate, whereas opaque ones (ghost of a chance, near the knuckle, dance on a land mine, تتغطى ما الشمس عين بغربال the sun cannot be covered with a sieve; العنب الشوك من تجنى لا إنك you cannot reap grapes from thorns; حلمة تشوف لما ودنك when you see your ear’s lobe; مخرز تقاوم ما العين the eye cannot defy a n awl). English expressions of impossibility were more difficult to translate than Arabic ones as they contained unfamiliar lexical items. Literal translation, explanation/paraphrase, partial translation, and extraneous translation were the most common strategies in that order. Detailed results and recommendations are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study compares the performance of three machine translation tools in English-Arabic translation to answer the questions of (a) whether the three machine translation tools, Google Translate, Systran and Microsoft Bing can be ordered in a hierarchy of performance, and (b) whether they can handle lexically and structurally ambiguous sentences and garden path sentences. Using a number of constructed and selected English sentences, the morphosyntactic features of number, gender, case, definiteness, and humanness, agreement between cardinal numerals and their head nouns, lexically and structurally ambiguous sentences and garden path sentences are used to test the three machine translation tools for performance. The results show that (a) as far as handling the morphosyntactic features of subject-verb agreement in Standard Arabic, all three machine translation tools perform equally well, and no machine translation tool seems to perform significantly better than the other two (b) some marked features (e.g. dual number and humanness) of SA seem to pose some problems for machine translation tools, and (c) lexically and structurally ambiguous sentences and garden path sentences seem to be the most challenging sentences for the three machine translation tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English and Arabic have many similarities and differences with regard to grammar. Consequently, the current paper is designed to investigate the grammatical problems that Iraqi EFL learners suffer from through the process of translation from English to Arabic. It draws upon contrastive analysis (CA) to help in solving the problems which encounter Iraqi EFL morning and evening learners. It aims at examining the contrastive grammatical difficulties and problems that Iraqi EFL learners encounter in English-Arabic translation; presenting a test for identifying the grammatical problems that EFL learners face in English-Arabic translation; providing solutions for such problems. It uses a translation test that consists of 20 items for testing one hundred EFL learners of English department for morning studies and another one hundred for evening studies, college of Education, University of Thi-Qar for the academic year 2022-2023. The test is analysed and discussed. After implementing and discussing the test, the study concluded that hypothesis (1) is verified that the errors students committed are classified as being interlingual or intralingual; hypothesis (2) also verified that here are some aspects in English have no equivalents in Arabic; hypothesis (3) is refuted since tenses and the emphatic do take the highest number of errors that EFL learners (morning and evening participants) commit in English-Arabic translations; hypothesis (4) is partially accepted is partially accepted because of the other simple problems in Arabic-English translation. It is concluded that the majority of Iraqi EFL learners suffer from the tenses, emphatic do, word order, and sentence connectors in English-Arabic translation and both morning and evening students do not suffer from big problems in translating the gerund, Od and Oi, conditional sentences, negation, adjectives, medal auxiliaries, prepositions, and articles in English-Arabic translation

Son and daughter metaphorical expressions are common in general as well as technical languages. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic ibn (son) and bint (daughter) expressions, and the difficulties that student-translators have with them. A corpus of English and Arabic general ibn (son) and bint (daughter) expressions (daughters of Eve, daughter of invention, son of Adam, son of a biscuit, son of a gun) and another corpus of specialized expressions (son of Minos, daughter board, daughter activity) were collected, analyzed and compared. It was found that ibn (son) and bint (daughter) expressions fall into 4 categories: (i) those that are identical in form and meaning in both languages (daughters of Eve, son of Adam); (ii) those that are similar in meaning but differ in wording (step-daughter); (iii) those that exist in English, but have no equivalents in Arabic (daughter of Sappho); and (iv) those that exist in Arabic but have no equivalents in English (daughter of Yemen, i.e., coffee). Specialized expressions used in medicine, computers, business and others are exact translations in both languages (daughter company, daughter cyst, daughter isotope). Student-translators could translate fewer than 13% of the Arabic test items and 12% of the English test items correctly and left 75% blank. Son and daughter expressions similar in both languages were easy to translate (like mother like daughter), whereas opaque ones (بنت الشفة), culture-specific ones (بنت أبيها، بنت بنوت، ابن لبون) and those requiring a specialized background knowledge were difficult (daughter board). Extraneous translation, paraphrase, Literal translation, use of synonyms, transliteration of Arabic words, partial translation, and giving the same translation for different expressions were the most common strategies. Translation difficulties are due to semantic and syntactic problems that the students have. Results and recommendations are given in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simile is one of the most important literary devices. It is widely used as a figure of speech in literary works. However, simile can pose significant challenges in literary translation since different languages might use and interpret similes differently. The present research aims at investigating the translation strategies employed in Arabic to render English similes in a literary text. The translation model proposed by Pierini (2007) is utilized as a framework of this study. The researcher selected "The Old Man and The Sea" novel by Ernest Hemingway and its two Arabic translations as a case study. The novel's two Arabic translations are by The United Publishers referred to later as target text 1 (TT1) and Zyad Zakaria referred to later as target text 2 (TT2). First, the researcher randomly collected 40 similes as the study data. Then, their Arabic translations are identified. Next, the data is compared and analyzed to determine their translation techniques. After analysis, the research found that literal translation is a prominent strategy in rendering English similes to Arabic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses a unique translation problem which translators from English into Arabic need to consider when inflecting the introductory verbs for the gender of in-text cited authors in scholarly books which use a style sheet that does not spell out the first name of authors in the list of references. Suppose a translator comes across the following sentence: 'Sander (1972) pointed out...', and that the reference list of the book provides E as the initial letter of the first name of Sander. Do we expect this sentence to be rendered into Arabic, a gender-specific language, as...ashaara saandar ( (1972...or...ashaarat saandar (1972)...? The reporting verbs...?ashaara and and...ashaarat show masculine and feminine inflection, respectively. As is clear, the readily available bibliographical information about Sander's first name does not tell the translator whether this author is a male, e.g., Erick Sander or a female, e.g., Emma Sander. Thus, this study seeks answers to the following questions: 1. Is it really the case that English-Arabic translations of scholarly works which do not spell out the first name of in-text cited authors suffer from gender-based problems associated with the reporting verbs? 2. If so, how does the translator, once aware of the scope of the problem, mange to resolve it in the absence of sufficient and self-explanatory information in the reference list where the in- text study is cited? he results show that English-Arabic translators tend to overlook the gender-based problem and inflect the reporting verbs using a masculine suffix whether the cited author is, in reality, a male or a female. he paper concludes with an experience-based proposal which may provide insights into addressing this problem [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polysemes are words that have multiple meanings. They exist in all languages as in Arabic عين صوت جدول جناح and English base, plant, system, present, left. A sample of Arabic and English polyseme translation errors was collected from homework-assignments and exams to explore the difficulties that student-translators have in translating English and Arabic polysemes. Data analysis showed that the students made more errors in translating Arabic polysemes to English than English polysemes to Arabic. They made more errors in translation polysemous compounds than single-word polysemes and the equivalent compounds had collocation errors. The students utilized different faulty strategies in translating polysemes, especially in source texts which have one-to-many equivalents (system, affairs). They tend to overgeneralize the equivalent they know to all contexts (develop, system), not the one suitable for a particular context/domain (*chemical plants; under president). They resorted to literal translation, i.e., word for word translation rather than using fixed formulaic equivalents that are dissimilar in structure to the source polyseme. They also overgeneralized the same equivalent to all contexts (develop, system; association), although each shade of meaning has a different equivalent. Faulty translation of polysemic words may be due to inadequate L1 competence such as the availability of different regional Arabic designations for 'parliament' and the different designations used in American and British English for وكيل وزارة الخارجية الامريكي)); lack of proficiency in EFL, i.e. limited vocabulary knowledge; unfamiliarity with specialized meanings (*chemical plants) and commonly used equivalents for 'affairs; resources'; lack of world knowledge (exchange programs; الاتحاد الأوروبي) and others. The study recommends that translation instructors develop students' vocabulary knowledge, word knowledge accuracy, schemata and world knowledge, metacognitive skills, i.e., thinking processes while translating, word and context analysis skills, i.e., using semantic and structural contextual clues to figure out the meaning of polysemes; and identifying the domain in which a polyseme is used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shop signs are a visible indication of the linguistic landscape of a place, hence the need for public policies to control, particularly, bottom-up signs in situations where there are issues, such ensuring consistency and correct representation in the second language. To investigate the linguistic landscape of bilingual shop signs in Saudi Arabia, this study examines the lettering in bilingual shop signs in shopping malls in Riyadh and Jeddah in terms of relative size, information, and the quality of English-Arabic (E-A) and Arabic-English (A-E) transliteration or translation. This was done in view of the national policy in Saudi Arabia which aims to ensure correct Arabisation when inconsistencies have been observed in the Arab world. Moreover, it gives an indication of the linguistic landscape, which is necessary given the need to prepare the kingdom for the Saudi 2030 Vision and cater to the growing number of international visitors. Altogether, 184 signboards were observed and categorised, of which 68 were shortlisted for further analysis. Of these, 54 were A-E signs and 17 were E-A signs, with two in both categories. The majority (83.3%) of signs were bilingual with slight variation in relative size and display of information. Same sized lettering was displayed in 66.7%, and the same information in 64.8%. Remedial suggestions are given for language policy-makers to address the issue found of a few inconsistent and erroneous transliterations and spellings, which together accounted for 9.3%. Overall, the case is not as bad in Saudi Arabia as noted in some other Arab countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Larq Journal for Philosophy, Linguistics & Social Sciences is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study investigates the use of conjunctive markers in translated Arabic texts against the background of corpus-based research on the recurrent features of translated language. Quantitative corpus-linguistic methods were used to investigate a comparable corpus of translated and non-translated Arabic that includes two registers, namely creative fictional narratives and legal writing. The aim of the analysis was to determine whether the independent variables of corpus and register have any significant main or interaction effects on the frequency of a set of conjunctive markers. The findings are interpreted within the framework of four features identified as characteristic of translated language, namely explicitation, normalisation, levelling out, and cross-linguistic influence. The findings confirm that there are differences between conjunction use in translated and non-translated Arabic, providing some support for features such as cross-linguistic influence, explicitation and normalisation, but also indicate that these effects are strongly conditioned by register. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine translation has facilitated the way for professional translators as well as ordinary people. Google Translate is undoubtedly the most popular machine translation program today. However, when translating texts from English into Arabic, the language errors that are produced by Google Translate are shocking, especially in encyclopedic texts. This article aimed at examining Google Translate errors in 10 encyclopedic texts of 10 sentences each. These texts were taken randomly from the free encyclopedia (Wikipedia) to represent 10 different academic disciplines. They were inputted into Google Translate to convert them from English into Arabic. The researcher traced 366 language errors in these texts (3.66 errors per sentence). Based on error analysis, these errors were categorized into: syntactic errors (55 errors), grammatical errors (174 errors) and semantic errors (137 errors). These errors are signaling alarm to Google Translate team to improve the program of translation from English into Arabic and to find solutions to its current deficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]