Artificial Intelligence or Human: The Use of ChatGPT in the Academic Translation for Religious Texts

Abstract

This article presents an empirical study investigating the ability of ChatGPT to translate religious texts involved in academic writing. Specifically, religious texts are not easy to translate even for human proficient translators. Three Arabic academic abstracts, religion-oriented, were involved in our study taken from AlQalam Journal which is published in Arabic and English. They have ready translations by the language adviser of the journal. The Arabic abstracts were first translated into English by ChatGPT. We then analyzed and compared ChatGPT translation to the human translation in terms of semantics and syntax. The former is represented by academic inappropriateness, failing to capture religious nuances, redundancy, translation gaps, and englishization, while the latter by first-person pronouns, to-infinitival vs. gerund use, passive versus active voice, full relative clauses, and indefiniteness. The findings revealed that ChatGPT’s performance is still far from human translation, and that ChatGPT translation needs significant human postediting. The study concludes with substantial recommendations for researchers and ChatGPT developers.