Arabic Machine Translation: A Strategic Choice for the Arab World

AbstractThe widespread use of computers and computer networks, not least of which is the Internet, and the impact this has had on the quantity of information production is putting insurmountable pressure on nations whose first language is not English. Keeping up with technological, economic, social, cultural, and political advancements in the first world is becoming an extremely laborious and costly, and ultimately impossible, task. This impossibility makes the task culturally alienating, since a nation will have to espouse the “language carrier”, namely English, and its cultural “load”. This paper is an attempt to draw the attention of all the Arab scientists as well as administrators and thinkers to the important, in fact strategic, nature of Machine Translation. The paper surveys the state of the technology as well as its western products and contrasts them to the state of Arabic Machine Translation. This is then used constructively to put forward a proposal for the development of Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics in the Arab World