Public MA Viva-Voce Examination of Ms. Asma Mohammed Hassen Esmail Sharaf Aldeen

The Public Viva-Voce Examination for the MA Thesis hereto entitled Adequacy in Human vs. Machine Translation: A Comparative Study of the Translation of Cohesive Devices from Arabic into English submitted by Ms. Asma Mohammed Hassen Esmail Sharaf Aldeen, Department of English, Faculty of Languages, was held on Wednesday, 04/05/1446 Hijri corresponding to 06/11/2024. The Viva-Voce Committee, which was formed based on a resolution issued by the Post-Graduate Studies and Scientific Research Council, consisted of the following:

The study aimed to show to what extent machine translation can produce cohesive translated texts from Arabic into English with linguistic accuracy and cultural acceptability in comparison with professional human translators.

The study concluded with a number of findings, including that MT (Google Translate ) faces major problematic issues when translating cohesive devices in media-political texts from Arabic into English, with a majority of errors in grammatical cohesive devices and then lexical cohesive devices. The study also revealed the main reasons behind the translation problems showing that the linguistic and cultural differences between English and Arabic are the most common reasons behind errors in the translation of cohesive devices by machine translation.

The researcher made several recommendations, including that machine translation needs post-editing and human involvement is still a must to ensure the production of a cohesive and coherent text with high-quality translation.

The MA thesis has been examined and is recommended by the Viva-Voce Committee for acceptance and approval. The Candidate was recommended to be awarded the degree of Master majoring in Translation with an overall grade of Excellent with Honor Rank 95%.

The viva was attended by academics, researchers, students, and other interested individuals, including the researcher’s colleagues and family members.