CONSISTENCIES IN MACHINE TRANSLATION: THE CASE OF ARABIC-ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF MEDIA AND LEGAL TERMS BY BING TRANSLATOR AND GOOGLE TRANSLATE

Machine translation has recently been noticed to be used by translators as they translate media and legal terms.The present study aims at investigating the appropriateness of the translations provided by Google Translate (GT) and Bing Translator (BT) for media and legal terms from Arabic into English.The researcher employs an analytical qualitative approach to achieve the objectives of the study.Thus, the researcher relied on comparing the translations provided by GT and BT to the meanings of the given terms in specialized dictionaries to decide on the appropriateness of machine translation and the translations of the programs to each other for the sake of identifying consistency.The results of the study showed that the investigated translation programs provide more appropriate translations for legal terms with a little preference for Bing Translator over Google Translate.The results of this study also reveal that Bing Translator and Google Translate were consistent in their translations of media and legal terms.The two investigated translation programs were more consistent in translating media terms than legal terms.In light of the results, the researcher recommends that GT and BT be carefully used as they provided inconsistent translations with the meanings of the terms in specialized dictionaries in a few cases.