Exploring the Role of Machine Translation in Translating English Collocations into Arabic: Insights from Student Translators

Abstract

Machine Translation (MT) has increasingly become an essential technology in the modern age. MT technology is currently used by many EFL learners as a learning facilitator. They are using MT as an essential tool to assist them in their foreign language learning activities. Several studies have focused on investigating the EFL students’ use of and attitudes towards MT in various EFL learning activities including reading, writing and vocabulary acquisition. However, few studies have been conducted on exploring the EFL learners’ use of MT technology in the translation of collocations, especially in the Arabic context. This study addresses this gap by investigating the impact of MT on the translation of English lexical collocations into Arabic. It presents a corpus of twenty English collocations given to thirty third-year translation students at an Omani university, who utilized an online MT system for their translations. Employing a descriptive, qualitative approach, the study assesses students' strategies and the accuracy of MT-generated equivalents, drawing from translation models by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) and Newmark (1988). The results indicated that the students were able to generate correct translations for certain collocations when using MT, but there were inaccuracies in the translation of other collocations. The study emphasized the importance of not solely depending on MT because doing so might reduce students' willingness to actively search for the most appropriate translations on their own. This suggests that a balanced approach to using MT and encouraging students to develop their translation skills independently is advisable. Future research can explore the use of Machine Translation in translating collocations in languages beyond Arabic and within different cultural and linguistic contexts.