For Arabic Native speakers, occasionally we face some technical terms which are challenging for translators. The theory says that concepts and terms that are understandable can be expressed in any life language. The aim of this discussion is to assist in translating challenging technical (in particular engineering) terms into Arabic.
An opening example is : Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL)....any suggestions?
اقتراحى الأولى المبنى على فهم فلسفة الموضوع هو ان تكون الترجمه :
"محاكى المعدات فى الزمن الحقيقى"
Hi Osama,
This is becoming a big issue in my field - the concern of domain loss - English technical terms are dominating academic fields, so your question is very relevant to the times.
Do you think that the words themselves should be translated (transliterally?) - or should the word capture the meaning of the underlying concept?
Is it ever possible to capture an entire concept in a single word?
This is an issue we have in English as well ... we have numerous words for the same concept ... May others contribute to the discussion as well :)
Hi Samantha,
I am pleased to know that the issue is extending outside the Arabic language. Indeed, your suggestions and questions are highlighting the underlying difficulties.
I personally think that translating the words themselves is useless and it can add a lot of ambiguity instead of enriching the target language. Alternatively I see that two other approaches are more functional. The first one as you mentioned is to use the words in the target language (in my case Arabic) that capture the meaning of the underlying concept. This would result in more intuitive translated terms. The other approach is to cast new terms that follow the phonetics of the original English terms in the target language. By casting I mean using the alphabet of the target language in writing the new terms such that they has a similar phonetics as their original English counterparts. By the way, the latter approach is naturally followed in many international languages when an original term in one language has a special interpretation that is not possible to be covered using one term in another language. Examples are:
- The English term "transistor' is translated in Arabic as "ترانزستور"
- The Arabic term "انتفاضه" is translated into English as "Intifada'
The first approach is more demanding for effort and creativity, the example I gave in my discussion opening was the "Hardware-in-the-Loop" or shortly "HIL", to follow the first approach, one needs to understand the background and the usage of the underlying concept, and to be careful not to be trapped into the direct translation of the words as it may be greatly misleading and confusing. As an application to the first approach, I translated this in Arabic as the equivalent Arabic terms of "Real Time Emulator of Equipment" or in Arabic alphabet "محاكى المعدات فى الزمن الحقيقى"
Really the subject is challenging and few efforts can be insufficient since some sort of consensus needs to be built around the outcomes of both approaches
One of the characteristics of the Arabic language is that it has an etymological system through which it can absorb various scientific and technical terms, in addition to its verbal richness that is not found in any other language.
يكون الحفاظ عليها بتفعيل الآليات الذاتية للغة العربية كالاشتقاق والنحت والقياس الاجتهادي وتفعيل آليات الجذب الخارجية كمراكز الأبحاث والمجامع اللغوية ومركز التقييس اللغوي وغير ذلك
ago
اللغة العربية لغة توليدية بامتياز ، عبر ميزانها الصرفي وصيغها السماعية المتعددة التي تمر بمرء كلمات وصيغ جديدة عبر التعريب والاشتقاق والنحت ، كما لابد من ممارسة اللغة تواصلا ونشرها على نطاق واسع
... اقرأ أكثر
أرجو أن تكون هذه المناقشة مساحه لاستضافة ترجمة المصطلحات الانجليزيه الصعبه الى مقابل عربى مستساغ يعظم استخدام المرونه الكامنه فى اللغة العربيه ويحوز على توافق واستحسان الكثيرين عبر اعطاء أمثله لترجمات مستساغ ومفهومه وبسيطه فى علوم الهندسه الكهربيه وأخرى غير مستساغه وغير بسيطه وصعبه الفهم ويمكن عند توافر تراكم جيد من المصطلحات اصدار كتيب يجمعها جميعا
Here is one term that needs some attention from Electrical machines and sensors researchers: resolver (this device coupled to a shaft and generates two orthogonal outputs sin and cosine signals) to measure the position and speed of a rotating shaft. .....what is the equivalent Arabic term?
My recommendation: resolver = مشفر دوران (حركه) جيبى
incremental encoder = مشفر دوران (حركه) تدريجى
absolute encoder = مشفر دوران (حركه) لحظى
The difference is inspired by the fact that an absolute encoder has a unique pattern for every position while an incremental one needs an index signal to be able to differentiate different positions
The weakness of language tools is not at all as much as it is related to the translator's ability to be aware of what the language itself wants.
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