Lexical and Structural Ambiguity in Machine Translation

Abstract

Machine Translation has come to fill the void existing due to the small number of translators and the impossibility of getting them everywhere. It saves both time and money. A large quantity of articles and documents are easily translated in a short time with a low amount of money but it encounters many problems. The purpose of this study is to investigate the difficulties facing Machine Translation (Google) particularly those related to lexis and structure. The researcher has chosen randomly two English and two Arabic texts about various sorts of translation: Media, Scientific, General and Economic. They were taken from several sources (websites, magazine..etc) to be translated automatically (Google) and humanly from Arabic to English and vice versa. Then they were analyzed to see the challenges that face Machine Translation (Google). This thesis consists of six hypotheses: 1. Machine translation can't produce a text or sentence of the same quality as that of a human being. 2. Machine translation can't convey the meaning as clear as human being does. 3. Machine translation will face difficulties unless it has a good system of semantics, morphology and syntax i.e. linguistics of different languages. 4. Problems will arise among languages belonging to different families. 5. Machine translation will face challenges in translating multi word forms. 6. To a large extend machine translation can't convey acronyms meanings from SL to TL. It appears during the analysis that MT is problematic and has many challenges concerning lexis such as (Deletions, non-vocalizations, multiple meanings, collocations, additions and acronyms) and syntax like: word order, verb-subject agreement, passive voice… etc. On the basis of the results of the study, the researcher recommended that further work needs to be done to create a system that comprises syntax, morphology and semantics of all languages.