AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION TO AND FROM ARABIC: A CHALLENGE OR AN ADVANTAGE ?

Abstract: Machine translation is a promising field within computational linguistics. Once a machine achieves fully accurate or near-accurate translation, linguistic barriers will be dismantled, as translation has been evolving into an objective science since the mid-20th century. Given the diversity of translation theories, techniques, types, and purposes, it has become necessary to regulate the field through scientific principles—especially as machine translation increasingly dominates the professional translation market and integrates into the translation production process. However, in the Arab world, machine translation development remains slow, driven primarily by individual efforts that expose a significant quantitative and qualitative gap in the field. There are almost no future-oriented or specialized plans, and existing Arabic-language translation systems still lack precision. This paper, from a computational linguistics perspective, examines the current state of machine translation in Arabic, addressing key challenges such as translating implicit meaning, context-dependent expressions, idioms, figurative language, connotations, and semantic shifts. It also proposes alternative solutions to mitigatethesedifficulties. Keywords: Machine translation – Artificial intelligence – Internet – Computationallinguistics – Arabiclanguage.