Inaccuracy of Machine Translation in Translating Medical Terms from English to Arabic

Résumé

Medical terminology has distinct qualities that cause significant challenges for translators while translating medical texts. Despite the creation of numerous medical dictionaries and the development of machine translation, many medical terms are still not included in these dictionaries, and machine translation cannot provide adequate translation. The main objective of the current study is to prove that machine translation does not provide accurate translation of medical terms. The medical terms used in this study contain single words, compounds and abbreviations. All terms used are classified into three categories: 15 related to COVID-19, 15 medical terms and 15 medical abbreviations. To translate these medical terms three free online applications have been selected: Google, Bing and Yandex. A comparison has been carried out to evaluate the quality of machine translation outputs by comparing the numbers and percentages of the correct responses occurring in English to Arabic translation outputs of the three machine translations using descriptive statistics. Furthermore, the findings were graphically represented. The results of the study clearly demonstrated the deficiencies of three online translators in translating different terms related to medicine.