{"id":4029,"date":"2016-10-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/2016\/10\/28\/challenges-of-translating-arabic-into-english\/"},"modified":"2018-09-27T20:09:22","modified_gmt":"2018-09-27T20:09:22","slug":"challenges-of-translating-arabic-into-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/2016\/10\/28\/challenges-of-translating-arabic-into-english\/","title":{"rendered":"Challenges of Translating Arabic into English"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Arabic is a very complex language, especially if you plan to translate your Arabic content into English, or vice versa. Arabic is classified as a member of the Semitic family of languages, English as a member of the Indo-European language family.<\/p>\n<p>In order to standardize written communication in Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the language of Arabic publications and the broadcast media. It differs from regional dialects and classical Arabic.<\/p>\n<p>Translation problems can be divided into linguistic and cultural categories. Linguistic problems include lexicon, morphology, syntax, text differences, rhetorical differences, and pragmatic factors.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/gpi-english20to20arabic20challenges-home_400x256.jpg\" width=\"400\" height=\"256\" alt=\"gpi-arabic to english challenges-home\" ><\/p>\n<p>Cultural problems arise for the Arab translator who may find certain phrases in Arabic have no equivalents in English. For example, the term \u062a\u064a\u0645\u0645 tayammum, meaning &#8220;the Islamic act of dry ablution using a purified sand or dust, which may be performed in place of ritual washing if no clean water is readily available&#8221;, doesn&#8217;t have a corresponding concept in English. (Source:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/translationjournal.net\/journal\/43culture.htm\" target=\"_blank\">TranslationJournal<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>Human translation of Arabic into English is difficult enough, but machine translation presents even more problems when translating between these two languages.<\/p>\n<p>In October 2015, Amin Ali Al-Mubark of the University of Jazan in Saudi Arabia\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.iasj.net\/iasj?func=fulltext&amp;aId=54595\" target=\"_blank\">published a small study<\/a> in the <em>Journal of Literature, Language and Culture<\/em> highlighting problems Saudi University of Translation students face when using machine translation to translate Arabic into English. He lists the following issues:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Sentences in Arabic are too long.<\/li>\n<li>The sentence structure is complex.<\/li>\n<li>An Arabic phrase is syntactically unclear and complex for machine translators, due to grammatical relationships, order of words and content.<\/li>\n<li>In Arabic terms and words can have multiple meanings<\/li>\n<li>The Arabic alphabet consists of 28 letters, and some of these have no equivalent in English.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In 2013, Bader S. Dweik and Maisa Suleiman\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ccsenet.org\/journal\/index.php\/ijel\/article\/view\/30644\" target=\"_blank\">published a paper<\/a> in the\u00a0<em>International Journal of English Linguistics<\/em> titled: Problems Encountered in Translating Cultural Expressions from Arabic into English.\u00a0The results of the study revealed that graduate students frequently encounter these problems:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Unfamiliarity with cultural expressions.<\/li>\n<li>Failure to achieve the equivalence in the second language.<\/li>\n<li>Ambiguity of some cultural expressions.<\/li>\n<li>Lack of knowledge of translation techniques and translation strategies.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The difference between the source language and the target language, as well as variations in their social and religious cultures, makes the process of translating from Arabic to English a huge challenge. Only if the translator has a solid understanding of the culture of the target language, and its specific linguistic rules and differences, can he or she interpret the implied meaning and translate it accurately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Arabic is a very complex language, especially if you plan to translate your Arabic content into English, or vice versa. Arabic is classified as a member of the Semitic family of languages, English as a member of the Indo-European language family. In order to standardize written communication in Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[96,393,172,394,395],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4029"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11162,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4029\/revisions\/11162"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}