423147

Evaluating English-Arabic translation: Human translators vs. Google Translate and ChatGPT

Article

Last updated: 04 May 2025

Subjects

-

Tags

Applied studies on translation
Computer translation
theoretical studies on translation
Translation criticism

Abstract

Machine Translation has seen rapid advancements due to progress in neural sciences and Large Language Models. While machine translation remains highly competitive across many language pairs, especially those that are linguistically and culturally close like English and Spanish (Moslem et al., 2023), the situation between English and Arabic requires further exploration. This study investigates the performance of Neural Machine Translation (represented by Google Translate), Large Language Models (represented by ChatGPT), and human translation in translating English texts into Arabic across four genres: general, literary, scientific, and media. Human evaluations were used to measure translation quality based on accuracy, fluency, style, cultural fit, and terminology. The results indicate that human translation is the most accurate, especially in capturing cultural and contextual nuances. ChatGPT, when used with detailed prompts, often outperforms both Google Translate and ChatGPT with simple prompts, particularly in literary and media genres. On the contrary, Google Translate performs the worst overall, especially with scientific and general texts, due to issues like word confusion and cultural inaccuracies. These results offer practical insights for translation educators, professionals, and students on effectively integrating Machine Translation tools while appreciating the irreplaceable value of human translators.

DOI

10.21608/jltmin.2025.423147

Keywords

ChatGPT, Google Translate, human translation, Machine Translation, Translation Quality Assessment

Authors

First Name

Saudi

Last Name

Sadiq

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

English Department, Faculty of Al-Alsun (Languages) Minia University

Email

saudi.sadiq@mu.edu.eg

City

Al Minya

Orcid

0000-0003-4491-4130

Volume

12

Article Issue

1

Related Issue

55188

Issue Date

2025-01-01

Receive Date

2025-04-18

Publish Date

2025-01-01

Page Start

67

Page End

95

Print ISSN

2735-4520

Online ISSN

2735-4539

Link

https://jltmin.journals.ekb.eg/article_423147.html

Detail API

http://journals.ekb.eg?_action=service&article_code=423147

Order

423,147

Type

مقالات بحوث مبتکرة

Type Code

1,567

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

Journal of Languages and Translation

Publication Link

https://jltmin.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Evaluating English-Arabic translation: Human translators vs. Google Translate and ChatGPT

Details

Type

Article

Created At

27 Apr 2025