Machine Translation in the Arab World: Overview and Perspectives
Translation Watch Quarterly, (2005)Abstract
The aim of this article is to shed light on the field of machine translation in the Arab world: where it started, its development, drawbacks and future perspectives. The choice to focus on MT in the Arab world is for various reasons. First, it is a domain that remains relatively unresearched. Second, Arabs have yet to ride the wave of one of the most profound technological phenomena in the history of humankind – the Internet. The Arab user’s potential inability to access pages in English on the Internet urges the need to translate those pages by machine. Thus, MT is a field that merits examination since most Arabs who have no command of foreign languages and particularly English cannot, in this age of information and knowledge but use translation to keep up with breakthroughs in a competitive global market. It is worth noting that Human Translators’ endeavors are never excluded from MT research and technology, as they constitute the driving force for the advancement of machine translation.