A Comparative Study between Chat GPT and Human Translation in Translating English Proverbs into Arabic

Chatbots have been increasingly applied in language learning.  It has a perceived effectiveness on the resulting knowledge of knowing the meaning of words. Proverbs are crucial in all languages and cultures. A proverb is defined in Collins dictionary as a short sentence that is often quoted by people to express something about life or to give advice.  The proverbs used in this study are gathered from “One Thousand and One English Proverbs translated into Arabic” by Omar Jabak. This research aims to pinpoint the differences between human translation and chatbots while translating twenty proverbs from English to Arabic. Moreover, this study aims to detect the most frequent errors indicated by Chat GPT as a translation strategy. The results reveal that special kinds of errors are performed by some machine translation chatbots more than others. They fail to translate the cultural aspects of the language. Moreover, choosing wrong lexical items and too literal translation are commonly detected errors more than others when analyzing the machine translation techniques as they fail to connote the intended meaning of the proverbs. The findings reveal the fact that some kinds of errors frequently occurred more than others. Also, it shows that the kinds of mistakes detected when using partial equivalence and paraphrasing are very similar when translating proverbs. Distortion of meanings and “comprehension errors” are the most common traced errors when translating proverbs using “paraphrase”. Providing the correct translation without fully comprehending the source text is impossible. Furthermore, this study sheds light on the problems of translations provided by machine translations and the drawbacks of chat Gpt as a translation tool.  Finally, further studies are needed in this field of research urgently.