Google Translate’s Rendition of Verb-Subject Structures in Arabic News Reports

Abstract

The present paper attempts to shed light on one of the issues of Arabic-English translation by the Google Translate service. The renditions provided for verb-subject structures in several news reports are compared and contrasted with the originals in order to come up with some rules which could assist in regulating the translation of the basic elements of the Arabic sentence in the above genre. A number of factors are taken into consideration, such as the length of the subject NP and the verb form and function. GT’s rendition of news reports may be improved by introducing certain rules associated with number and articles as well as a limited number of reporting verbs..