419422

Crisis Machine Translation: A Linguistic Review of Rendering COVID 19 Terms into Arabic

Article

Last updated: 29 Mar 2025

Subjects

-

Tags

Studies in Translation

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic that broke out in 2019 and 2020 brought challenges to translators of different languages. The crisis entailed the introduction of special new terminology for announcing news and communicating in the scientific field about the disease. People all over the globe kept talking about the same single topic at different levels of communication, i.e., daily conversations, scholarly lectures, TV news and programs, medical jargon and so on. Accordingly, there was a need to translate the new terms into different languages and enrich scientific lexicography. This study examines newly coined English terms and their Arabic translation using machine translation systems. A review of linguistic means of localizing these terms is made, and three MT engines are used to translate the newly coined terms into Arabic; Google Translate, Reverso, and Microsoft Translator Bing. It aims to investigate the ability of these MT systems to produce accurate Arabic translations of Covid 19 newly coined terms. The product is compared to the translation of the same terms in Dictionary of COVID 19 Terms by Arab League Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization (ALECSO). The results show a difference in accuracy among the three systems. The three MT systems do not provide a product as comprehensive as that rendered by the dictionary. However, they are reliable with a little help from human translators for a better output. It is concluded that the significance of the product rendered by MT systems lies not only in the accuracy but rather in its acceleration during the crisis.

DOI

10.21608/tjhss.2025.336407.1277

Keywords

Machine Translation, lexicography, Google Translate, Reverso, Microsoft Translator Bing

Authors

First Name

Lamia

Last Name

Frere

MiddleName

Nabil

Affiliation

English Dep. The Higher Technological Institute, 10th of Ramadan city, Egypt

Email

lamia.frere@gmail.com

City

-

Orcid

-

Volume

6

Article Issue

2

Related Issue

54729

Issue Date

2025-01-01

Receive Date

2024-11-14

Publish Date

2025-01-01

Page Start

284

Page End

298

Print ISSN

2636-4239

Online ISSN

2636-4247

Link

https://tjhss.journals.ekb.eg/article_419422.html

Detail API

http://journals.ekb.eg?_action=service&article_code=419422

Order

419,422

Type

Original Article

Type Code

1,087

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Publication Link

https://tjhss.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Crisis Machine Translation: A Linguistic Review of Rendering COVID 19 Terms into Arabic

Details

Type

Article

Created At

29 Mar 2025