Examining the Cultural Connotations in Human and Machine Translations: A Corpus Study of Naguib Mahfouz's Zuqāq al-Midaqq
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1503.03Keywords:
machine translation, human translation, artificial intelligence, GhatGPT, corpus, literary textsAbstract
The translation of culture-specific terms constitutes a major challenge for professional translators as it necessitates a thorough understanding of both the linguistic and cultural elements. With rapid technological advancement over the past few years, machine translation has enhanced translation quality. This study investigates the transability of cultural connotations in the Arabic-English translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s Zuqāq al-Midaqq. A descriptive qualitative research design was adopted to achieve the intended goals of the study. The data comprised human and machine translations from Google Translate and ChatGPT. Through qualitative content analysis, the translations were compared for accuracy in transferring the cultural connotations prevalent in the Arabic source text. The findings revealed that the human translation showed greater naturalness and accuracy in rendering cultural connotations. Machine translation has struggled with rhetorical devices, idioms, and cultural nuances. The results also indicated that the AI-enhanced machine represented by ChatGPT captured the cultural elements more effectively than Google Translate. The study concluded that human expertise remains essential for the high-quality translation of literary works to maintain cultural significance. The findings can inform translator training and guide improvements to AI-enhanced translation for literary texts.
References
Abdel-Hafiz, A. (2003). Pragmatic and linguistic problems in the translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs. Babel, 49(3), 229–252. https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.49.3.04abd
Abu Hamda, E., Ismail, I., & Bsharat, T. (2021). Understanding quantitative and qualitative research methods: A theoretical perspective for young researchers. International Journal of Research, 8(2), 71-87. DOI: 10.2501/ijmr-201-5-070
Abushihab, I., Abu Qattam, M., & AlQbailat., N. (2023). The Impact of Using Novels in the EFL Classroom: A Pragmatic Outlook. Social Science Journal, 13(3), 2164-2170.
Afzaal, M., Imran, M., Du, X., & Almusharraf, N. (2022). Automated and Human Interaction in Written Discourse: A Contrastive Parallel Corpus-based Investigation of Metadiscourse Features in Machine-Human Translations. SAGE Open, 12(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440221142210.
Al Kaabi, M. (2020). Iikhtizaal alnaqd aladabii lilshi'r walshuaraa eabar alssoorah albayaniyah mafradaat wajumal [Abstracting literary criticism of poetry and poets through metaphorical image: Vocabulary and sentences]. Palestinian Journal of Open Education, 11(21), 33-57.
Albir, A. H., & Alves, F. (2009). Translation As A Cognitive Activity. In Munday, J. ed. The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies. Routledge, pp.54-73. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203879450-11
Alhamshary, Y. (2021). On Translating Culture-Bound Expressions in Naguib Mahfouz' s the Thief and the Dogs” Allasu Walkalab”: A Comparative Study in Arabic-English Translation. Wadi Al-Nil Journal For Humanitarian, Social and Educational Studies and Researches, 137-188. doi: 10.21608/jwadi.2021.73469.1029
Aljabri, S. (2021). Translation of Culture-Specific Items from English into Arabic in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 13(2), 1-21.
Battah, M. (2023). Translating Cultural Bound Terms (Cbts) From the Zuqaq El Midaq (Midaq Alley) By Naguib Mahfouz: Challenges and Strategies. Journal of Namibian Studies: History Politics Culture, 33, 3979-3990.
Chu, C., & Wang. R. (2018). A Survey of Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1304–1319, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Costa-Juss, M. R., Rapp, R., Lambert, P., Eberle, K., Banchs, R. E., & Babych, B. (2016). Hybrid approaches to machine translation. In Theory and applications of natural language processing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21311-8.
Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Demitry, N. S. W. D. (2018). The Translation of Figurative Language and Culture-Specific Items in Two Novels by Naguib Mahfouz: The Thief and the Dogs and Miramar: A Comparative Study. CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education, 64(1), 295-323.
Dowaidar, I. M. (2016). The Translation of Humor in Naguib Mahfouz Al-Qahira Al-Jadida (Cairo Modern): A Case Study. Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, 76(8), 61-104.
Garg, A., & Agarwal, M. (2018). Machine translation: a literature review. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.01122.
Ismail, I. A., Bsharat, T. R. K., & Amirbayeva, D. (2022). Vague language: A critical reading. Research, Society and Development, 11(10), e587111033309. https://doi.org/10.33448/rsd-v11i10.33309
Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology (2nd ed.). SAGE Publications.
Lefevere, A. (1992). Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. Routledge.
Lihua, Z. (2022). The Relationship between Machine Translation and Human Translation under the Influence of Artificial Intelligence Machine Translation. Mobile Information Systems, 2022, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/9121636
Lotfipour-Saedi, K. (1992). Analysing Literary Discourse: Implications for Literary Translation. Meta, 37(2), 193–203. https://doi.org/10.7202/004016ar
Mehawesh, M. I. (2023). Human Translation vs. Machine Translation in the Naguib Mahfouz's Novel Palace Walk: A Case Study. Mutah Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences (MJHSS), 38(2), 13-33.
Newmark, P. (1988). A textbook of translation. New York: Prentice Hall.
Obeidat, A., & Sepora, T. (2019). Collocation translation errors from Arabic into English: A case study of Naguib Mahfouz's novel "Awlad Haratina". International Journal of Humanities, Philosophy and Language, 2(7), 129-138.
Omar, A., $ Gomaa, Y.A. (2020). The Machine Translation of Literature: Implications for Translation Pedagogy. Int. J. Emerg. Technol. Learn., 15, 228-235.
Pandian S, L., Kadhirvelu, K. (2012). Machine Translation from English to Tamil using Hybrid Technique. International Journal of Computer Applications, 46(16), 36-42.
Rivera-Trigueros, I. (2021). Machine translation systems and quality assessment: a systematic review. Language Resources and Evaluation, 56(2), 593–619. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-021-09537-5.
Shintemirova, M. (2023). Translation of Metaphors in Official and Automatic Subtitling and MT Evaluation. Journal of Computational and Applied Linguistics, 1, 77-93.
Thai, K., Karpinska, M., Krishna, K., Ray, B., Inghilleri, M., Wieting, J., & Iyyer, M. (2022). Exploring document-level literary machine translation with parallel paragraphs from world literature. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.14250.
Toral, A., & Way, A. (2018). What Level of Quality Can Neural Machine Translation Attain on Literary Text?. In: Moorkens, J., Castilho, S., Gaspari, F., Doherty, S. (eds) Translation Quality Assessment. Machine Translation: Technologies and Applications, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91241-7_12
Toral, A., Way, A. (2015). Machine-assisted translation of literary text. Translation Spaces, 4(2), 240–267. https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.4.2.04tor
Toral, A., Wieling, M., & Way, A. (2018). Post-editing effort of a novel with statistical and neural machine translation. Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 5(9), 1-11. DOI: 10.3389/fdigh.2018.00009
Wang, H., Wu, H., He, Z., Huang, L., & Church, K. (2022). Progress in machine translation. Engineering, 18, 143–153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2021.03.023
Yousef, T. (2012). Literary translation: Old and new challenges. International Journal of Arabic-English Studies, 13(1), 49-64.