CAT IN SAUDI ARABIA

1. CAT IN SAUDI ARABIA By :Deemah Alnasser Areej AlTalb Deemah Alyabis Wafa Alamoudi Maram aljrewy Reem Alkames

2. Translation studies have witnessed unparalleled worldwide growth over the course of the last ten years. Meanwhile, an increasing demand for staff with skills in information technology and language engineering just cannot be satisfied .The world market in translation thought to be worth in excess of 10billion pound a year. Saudi translation market is expanding enormously study presents the results of market research project funded by king abudal aziz university in Jeddah which is aimed at addressing the huge gap that exists between the training of translators at Saudi universities and the requirements of professional life

3. Official statistics • It is hard to estimate accurately the number of interpreters and translators in Saudi Arabia since there is no official commercial register • . for example many prominent translation offices such as the universal summit translation center (USTC) are not listed even thought they have an online presence and many contact numbers are either omitted or erroneous

4. Training programmes in Saudi Arabia • exist I Saudi Arabia not in the form of independent institutions, but in the form of university colleges • Recently established translation training center is RAWAFID CORPORATE TRAINING which offers diplomas in applied translation and specialized courses in various fields of translation.

5. Components of translation technology • MT • CAT • CAT systems or translation memories are designed to eliminate unnecessary human intervention so as to save significant time and money • four components • Instant translation, Glossary of terms, Translation memory , Keywords extractor

6. Saudi Industries and Translation Technologies • Many organizations employ different employees that speak different languages. It has become a priority for some organizations such as Aramco, the Saudi Electric company and the Shoura Council to implement the Translation Technology among its work program. • The impacts of Machine Translation can vary and it affects both the translation process and the personnel involved. In order for translators to carry out these functions, they need to receive adequate training and programming of such translation programs.

7. :Related Literature • A study has been conducted on Saudi Translation students stating that female translation students were found to more efficient than male translation students. However, when it came down to the actual on job experience, the percentage of females was found to be a lot less than the percentage of males working as translators in various work places. The study concluded that some of these factors required the use and experience with medical and diplomatic terminologies, and this was problem because translation students were trained to be translators not terminologists. In addition, many females translators could not pursue a career of translation due to social and culture factors. Another study was done to investigate the current situation of translators at the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This study concluded that there was a problem with the curriculum of the translation colleges. Many of these curriculums were too general and did not sufficiently prepare students for translation labor market. It also emphasized on the need to have specialities and subspecialties such as medical, legal, diplomatic and simultaneous translation and interpretation. Moreover, the study has revealed an inadequacy of translation training in Saudi universities and has showed a gap between academic trainings and requirements of the professional world. Therefore, there is a growing need of interpreting skills in the labour market.

8. Machine translation in Saudi Arabia is still lagging behind due to various reasons such as cultural and academic misconceptions. • The labour market is constantly changing, therefore students should be prepared to meet challenges in the market such as legal translation, commercial translation, financial translation, subtitling, multimedia translation, localization, translating using voice recognition system

9. :Materials and Methods • In order for studies to be pursued and to reflect the project objectives. It is divided into two sections and they are training and assessment of translation technologies, and attitudes/misconceptions.

10. Training and Assessment of Translation :Technology • The SDL Trados system is one of the most popular Computer Aided Translation software. In this study an assessment was done on the training of this particular translation technology of SDL Trados software. As part of the study, questionnaires were designed to assess the trades system as regards the productivity, quality of output, speed and level of difficulty. The study included the participation of 13 subjects all of which were employees at King AbdulAziz University. These employees came from different departments such as linguistics, translation, French literature, computer science and business and accounting. All subjects received a training of 35 hours on how to used Trados and to know all the four basic components of Trados which are: Terminology Management, Machine Translation, WinAllign or visual alignment of Source Text and Target Text. Later on, the Trados system was installed in four different sectors, in order to encourage staff members to share translated documents and glossaries as well as to enable them to collaborate on larger and more complex translation projects. The survey questions aimed at assessing the quality of translation output at King Saud University, their attitude towards grammatical mistakes in ARabic-English translation, their receptiveness to translation technology, their computer skills, their translation skills, their frequency of translation, and their attitude towards performing translation projects.

11. Attitudes/misconceptions and obstacles hindering the use of translation technologies: • There can be obstacles hindering the translation technology such as negative attitudes towards Machine Translation is a challenging experience. This experience involved the merging of two cultures and tow linguistic backgrounds, English and Arabic. It started with personal contact and explorations of attitudes, beliefs and motives to forge an overall picture of the root cause. The end of the trades training period showed a total of 13 subjects that showed the following, 84% were rated as very good, while 7% were rated poor.

12. Results of Attitudes/Misconceptions Hindering Translation Technology : • there are four major obstacles hindering the introduction of MT: • 1_Translation as a Means of Learning English • 2_Negative Attitudes towards Translation Technology • 3_ Indifference of University Administrators to Market Needs • 4_Lack of Computer Literacy

13. :11. Discussion and Implications • 1-The Technology-assisted Approach to the Teaching of Translation • 2-Affective contribution • 3-Translation Curriculum Development

14. Attitudes Hindering the Integration of TT: • The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia cherishes and honors the Arabic language because it is the language of the Holy Quran. Therefore, English is not administered in schools until a later age. However, there is still the need for English translation in certain aspects such as medical translations and conferences. Therefore the need for Machine Translation is of high demand in the country. However, there are conflicting cultural views that hinder the implementation of this technology. Even though the benefits of MT are far greater than those of the disadvantages, Saudis believe that it is cheaper and less time consuming to use Human translators. Saudis see MT to be having crude output, full of errors, and requires to much human post editing. They believe that human translation is faster, more accurate and less expensive than MT and that no support for MT should be provided.

15. Conclusions and Recommendations: • it was found that the majority of translators consider their technology skills to be good or at least adequate, therefore this makes them reluctant to pursue the world of Machine Translation. • It is recommended that courses be designed to give students a chance to use the software for real. In addition to a number of software related roles such as those of terminologists, proof-reader, desk-top publishing specialist and project manager. • Translation in Saudi Arabia has faced several problems due to delay of introduction of the English language until the intermediate This has contributed to the fact that Saudi translators are still using dictionary-based strategy. There are cultural and social attitudes that hinder the acceptance of Machine Translation and technology. • level.