"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.)

Why is so Little of Al-Mutanabbi Translated Into English?

My first reaction to the question in the title was "Why do so few people choose to vacation in North Korea?" because Mutanabbi is a difficult poet to read even for native Arabic speakers. But my snark isn't fair because he is also widely considered the greatest poet after the age of the Mu‘allaqat. *I'm obviously not a native speaker, as was made plain some 40 years back when I took a CASA program course at AUC in Cairo on the poetry of Mutanabbi. With the possible exception of an undergrad course I once took on Ludwig Wittgenstein because it had a title that concealed its real subject, I have rarely felt so out of my depth.

The question is raised by The Egypt Independent and linked to with some comment by Arabic Literature (in English). I suggest you read both.

An earlier post in the series, which I linked to, noted the difficulty of translating James Joyce into Arabic. The issues are not dissimilar, though they go in opposite directions, and the only real parallels between Joyce and Mutanabbi are that both men loved words and played beautifully with them. (I would think it would be difficult to translate Shakespeare for the same reason, but he's popular in many languages.)

As the Italians say, traduttore, traditore,  "translation is treason": (and to prove my point, I just mistranslated it: literally it's "Translator, Traitor."

So for you students of Arabic reading this: therre's an Everest still waiting to be climbed. Translate Mutanabbi.

New Blog: Tunisian Literature (in English)

Via the great literary blog Arabic Literature (in English) we are informed of a new blog: Tunisian Literture (in English). run by Tunisian poet Ali Znaidi. It's not only a welcome addition to the limited number of Arabic literature blogs in English, but also a sign of the growing role of English in Tunisia, a country where French remains, overwhelmingly, the second language and the primary cultural language of the elite.

English Under Fire in Both Israel and Egypt

This blog is written in English, so obviously I am part of the sinister plot by the English-speaking world, or American imperialism, or whoever (Illuminati? Freemasons?) to destroy the cultures of the non-English speaking world. It's a known threat (you could ask the French), and this week the creeping English menace came under fire from Israelis and Egyptians both: the Hebrew Language Academy on the one hand and a Salafi Member of Parliament on the other, which shows the pervasiveness of the threat that such diverse folks agree on it.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Here's Ha'aretz' report on "Israel's Academy of the Hebrew Language Declares War — on English." Admittedly the headline and lead paragraph are a bit strong: the Academy wants the Education Ministry to make sure Hebrew is used as a teaching medium in all universities and schools. (Ah, but look: I've cited Ha'aretz' English-language website!) Of course, the growing dominance of English lectures and textbooks in some professional fields (medicine, computing, the sciences, etc.) raises concerns in many countries seeking to protect their own language.

Naturally, the Egyptian Salafi is more willing to spot plots where they lurk. An MP from the Al-Nour Party, which continues to lend credibility to the Muslim Brotherhood's claims of moderation since it allows the Brothers to point to Al-Nour to show you what extremism is, one Mohamed El-Kurdi, has discovered that a USAID grant aims to help Egyptian schools to start teaching English in the second grade instead of the fourth. (The horror!) Ahram Online quotes him as telling Parliament that "We have to be aware that they want our children to be culturally westernised.” (And yes, I'm quoting Ahram Online's English web portal.)

Now, I have no standing to lampoon this Salafi for opposing education in a week when a major candidate for my own country's Presidency called the incumbent President a "snob" for suggesting that everyone who wanted to go to college or vocational school should have that opportunity. But somehow I never saw all those little kids who come up to you in the street and proudly say "What time is it now?" to show off their English as the vanguard of US cultural imperialism, and I have trouble picturing second graders in Egyptian villages listening to rap and dressing Goth in the near future, which is to say the next few millennia.

Not everybody agrees:

"We definitely should not neglect our mother tongue but I would remind Mr Kurdi that learning foreign languages was advised by Prophet Mohamed," said Amina Nosseir, professor of Islamic Philosophy at Al-Azhar University, to Ahram Online. "Communication is essential, especially after the world became like one street. Such opinions [as Mr Kurdi's] are not supportive in building our nation."

"I hate the discourse that we're targeted by the West all the time. Are we [Egyptians] so naïve and dim-witted to be so easily manipulated or influenced?" Nosseir exclaimed.

Of course, I'm not sure what Mr. El-Kurdi (who of course is on Parliament's Education Committee) may think of women professors like Prof. Nosseir, either. As for her final question, I don't think Egyptians are that susceptible or, as she puts it, "dim-witted," though Mr. El-Kurdi does perhaps constitute a counter-example.