"The Google Translate Plague" and an Omani Linguistics Blog

The blog "Exploring Oman's Linguistic Treasures" (yes,there is one) has a piece some of you may find interesting: "The Google Translate Plague."

Apparently the blogger's English students are doing translation exercises from Arabic into English by simply cutting and pasting from Google Translate, with predictably awkward results:

I started my post with a rather strange appreciation of the skills needed to plagiarise. The reason is because a lot of students do not even bother about all skills mentioned. So if they don't use those skills and they don't produce their authentic work, then what do they do? They simply go to this tool which was created for great purposes, none of which I am sure is to help students cheat: www.translate.google.com . They simply paste their Arabic text in there and get a ready made piece of writing in English.

The messily-translated chunks of language submitted can be outrageous but hilarious at the same time. And I say it's messy because as a machine translator it translates things literally in terms of meaning and discards any grammatical rules of the second language most of the time; it simply follows the word order of the translated language. The effect, my respected readers, can be speechless, as you realise. One student for instance, typed all the Arabic he wanted to express and clicked to translate it into English. Apparently the student wanted to translate the word 'feather' (singular) to English. Note that the Arabic word for feather and badminton (the sport) is the same. The student ended up submitting something that is along the lines of 'the badminton of the bird'...which is interesting if you think about it; but maybe in a fictional text rather than non-fictional prose?

The blogger doesn't post much but there are a few interesting posts on such minority languages as Jabbali, and on a subject we've discussed here a time or two, Cypriot Maronite Arabic. (Earlier posts by me on this curious dialect here and here.)

November 5, 1914: Britain and France Declare War on Ottomans, UK Changes Status of Cyprus, Egypt

On this day in 1914, Great Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire, which had a few days earlier joined the Central Powers and gone to war with Russia.

On this day also, the British formally annexed the island of Cyprus, which they had held as a protectorate since 1878, and began moves to eradicate the last formal links between Egypt and the Ottomans.

The Cyprus matter is a reminder of how much Great Power alignments had changed in the previous four decades. In 1878, in exchange for British agreement to protect the Ottoman Empire from defeat in the Russo-Turkish War and in the negotiations at the Congress of Berlin ("The Russians shall not have Constantinople!"). But by 1914, Britain an Russia were on the same side in the new war, and the Committee of Union and Progress (the "Young Turks") were throwing in their lot with the Germans and Austrians.

As part of its declaration of war against the Ottomans, the British ended the protectorate status of Cyprus and annexed the island to their Empire.

Sultan Hussein Kamil

Egypt, however, was a trickier question. Egypt had in effect been under British economic and political control since 1882 and had been under the rule of the Muhammad ‘Ali dynasty of local rulers for a century, but legally it was still an Ottoman province (albeit virtually independent of Constantinople and de facto under British occupation). The Khedive of Egypt, Abbas Hilmi II, was pro-Ottoman and anti-British, so the British, after declaring war on the Ottomans, deposed him. In December they declared Egypt a Protectorate of Great Britain (which it already was in all but name) and named Abbas Hilmi's uncle, Hussein Kamel, the Sultan of the new Sultanate of Egypt. His reign began December 19.

Flag of the Sultanate of Egypt

Hussein Kamel died in 1917 and was succeeded by his brother Sultan Ahmad Fuad I. With nominal Egyptian independence in 1922, he became King Ahmad Fuad I; the modern Egyptian Sultanate had lasted only from 1914 to 1922.

Cypriot Maronite Arabic, Again

The National has a piece on Cypriot Maronite Arabic, the dialect of Arabic which survives among the Maronites of Cyprus. This article quotes local claims that the local Arabic is rooted in Aramaic, which seems doubtful though the Maronite liturgy retains some Aramaic parts.

I posted last year on Cypriot Maronite Arabic, including a video in which some of it is heard, and comments by a linguist. That's probably a bit more reliable on the alleged Aramaic links, but still, the survival of Arabic on Cyprus is a fascinating subtext in its own right.