Investigating Problems Related to the Translation of Idiomatic Expressions in the Arabic Novels Using Neural Machine Translation

Abstract

NMT systems encounter many challenges and problems when rendering Arabic idiomatic expressions into English. The current research tackled some examples selected from Arabic corpora and their English translations generated by the selected NMT systems and the English versions of the selected corpora. The research presents a qualitative analysis of the selected samples from three novels (The Season of Migration to the North, the Fall of the Imam and the Girls of Riyadh). The research is mainly focusing on the problems resulted when rendering Arabic idiomatic expressions into English.