Machine Translation: Solutions to Challenges in Translating Arabic Poetry into English

الملخص

The current study tackles the effectiveness of machine translation (MT) in translating Arabic poetry into English. It focuses on selected lines from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem "على هذه الأرض ما يستحق الحياة" On This Land, There Is That Which Makes Life Worth Living. The aim of the study is to examine how effective MT is in translating Arabic poetry into English through pursuing three objectives: to evaluate the efficiency of MT in achieving both linguistic accuracy and poetic fidelity, to compare translations using Google Translate to those done by professional human translators, and to suggest strategies that improve translation quality. The study adopts a qualitative eclectic model based on Mona Baker’s (1992) equivalence model and James Holmes’s (1988) literary translation framework. While the findings unveil the effectiveness of MT in capturing the basic lexical and grammatical equivalence, it often fails to deliver metaphorical depth, cultural nuances, rhythmic patterns, and emotions. Conversely, human translations succeed in preserving the aesthetic and symbolic layers of the original text- showing a clear adaptability to stylistic and contextual challenges. Thus, the study concludes that the present systems of neural machine translation (NMT) are not fully effective for translating poetry, which accordingly stresses the indispensable role of human translators. Eventually, the study recommends using certain methods such as post-editing or human and MT collaboration in order to link the gap between linguistic efficiency and artistic integrity.