Investigating the Rate of Agreement and Disagreement of Tense and Aspect of Quranic verbs in Arabic to English Translations: Experimental Results and Analysis

Jawharah Alasmari, Janet Watson, Eric Atwell

Abstract


The practice and denotation of tense and aspect differ in Arabic and English, so there is a challenge when translating between the two languages, particularly when the appropriate translation depends on a range of linguistic contexts, comprising also the context of use. In this paper, the Qur’anic Arabic corpus of verbs is used in Arabic with their English translations by building a sub-corpus of verbs. The study uses a statistical method incorporating SPSS and Kappa feature of SPSS to investigate the rate of agreement and disagreement of Quran Verb Tense and Aspect in Arabic to English translations. The aim is to provide information that can be used to address some of the challenges that arise when translating between Arabic and English. The SPSS results indicate the highest percentage for past, present and future tenses of Quranic Arabic verbs; the progressive and perfective aspect has the lowest percentage. Kappa must is used to estimate the disagreement between translations with a stronger measure than the SPSS percent agreement calculation, while κ also takes into consideration the possibility of the agreement occurring by chance. The results show a clear disagreement between the original text, and its translations, while the agreement varies between strong and weak. This indicates that there are difficulties when translating Arabic verbs into English. 


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References


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