Institute Promotes Scientific Development in Arab Speaking Countries

Introduction

The institution translates scientific articles, designs media, and writes articles and reports on scientific and technical news in the region or worldwide. It also organizes science-related events to promote educational, technological, and scientific development in Arab speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa. At the heart of its strategy is the desire to recruit and prepare volunteers and aspiring scientists to translate and write scientific materials for the public. The institution's volunteers use a very simple and straightforward method for communication driven by Trello Platform. Trello Platform offers users boards web pages for collaboration, ease of organization, and other useful features of virtual team management.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

According to the primary data collected by Trello, there are 290 members in the Translation and Writing Unit, volunteers and staff of Scientific Saudi, while on the Proofreading and Editing Unit has 139 members who have access to the board. The institution has more than 200 volunteers. All of them are native speakers of Arabic, and they are located in different countries, as shown in the chart below.

Figure 1: Locations of Scientific Saudi volunteers

The lingua franca of the world nowadays is English; so there are few scientific resources in Arabic. The Scientific Saudi initiative is enriching the Arabic scientific field, and it is especially helpful for the first-year medical students who struggle with the English language resources.

Muath Alduhishy founded the Scientific Saudi in 2012 as a Facebook page, at the age of 25, while he was a medical student at the University of Queensland. The institution has since expanded to cover most of the social media platforms and, today, stands as one of the most significant scientific websites in Saudi Arabia. The managers of the institution are a group of volunteers who follow recent researches and scientific discoveries aimed at spreading knowledge and science in a direct and clear language satisfying both the specialists and non-specialists who might be interested.

In a recent interview, Muath Alduhishy explained his reasons for founding Scientific Saudi and his choice of the name: "At this moment, I realized that it's my duty to bridge the gap, or at least to attempt to do so, due to the fact that I have always been passionate about science. I have been nurturing my passion for years through listening to scientific shows and podcasts and subscribing to scientific publications, such as your sister science publication Scientific American, hence the name Scientific Saudi." Already the institution has succeeded in creating a scientific atmosphere that allows collaboration between scientists from different disciplines and hence gives the reading audience a chance to benefit from the scientist's expertise.

Background Information

Arabic has been noted to be a very complex language which has proved translation of the English language to Arabic to be a difficult task. The translation studies have identified Arabic as a Semitic family of languages, which means that many translators have not been willing to take part in this translation. In the Middle East, most of the translators have been volunteers who enjoy the task for their own fulfillment. However, they have also suggested difficulties in the task mainly when translating from English, which is a member of the Indo-European language family. The avoidance of challenges anticipated from this exercise has thus prompted the development of Arabic Translation. Modern Standard Arabic was developed to standardize the oral and written communication in the Arabic language, which is used as the language of Arabic publications as well as of the broadcast media.

A 2015 study in the University of Jazan in Saudi Arabia established that the translation students in the Saudi University were facing numerous challenges similar to those that faced by volunteer translators in the region been facing. According to the study, the challenges that face the institutions of translations and students of translation encounter include the complex and long sentences of Arabic with the Arabic terms, as well as words demonstrating multiple meanings, which makes the analysis difficult.

The study revealed that the Arabic phrases are syntactically unclear and too complicated for machine translation. A comparison of the grammatical relationships as well as the order of words in the Arabic language with those in English demonstrated that the use of the machine can can distort the overall meaning of the text. It can even invert the true meaning. Students have been especially intent on relying on machine translation, with the result that they have had very limited regarding its success.

Complications also arise the fact that Arabic words frequently have multiple meanings. With some words consisting of about 28 letters which may not have their equivalent in English, it is hard to use a computer-aided translation, unless the program has sufficiently high intelligence to differentiate the meaning in the sentence. The researcher prefers the application of machine translation. Which has developed greater speed and accuracy. To the tedious task of track changes, though it too is not entirely dependable.

Human-aided translation has remained a common practice with some scientists, who criticize machine translation for its inefficiency and inaccuracy. Many translators in the Middle East have argued that the unrelated language groups to which English and Arabic belong make the machine translation too problematic to produce a meaningful and coherent translation. There is a need, therefore, to further evaluate the translation modes and establish the underlying factors that have made these translators opt for track changes in Word documents.

As noted by Jody Byrne, translation has been an important aspect of and driving force in modern society. It facilitates the flow of ideas, the increase in expertise, as well as the growth of shared values between different people in modern society. Indeed, the role of scientific as well as technical translation in the modern information age has become an important aspect in society. Byrne noted that it had facilitated some fundamental advancements in the scientific and technological translation fields. Everything in modern life has been noted to be facilitated virtually by education. This implies that the knowledge of education has been critical in work hence needs multiple interventions and considerations, especially how translation is carried out as a vehicle to facilitate academic development and knowledge sharing. Although translation in studies has been a common term, the developments in the scientific and technical translations have been a fascinating area of study that has a profound impact on society. This has borrowed its development from the traditional developments of translation, which are essential in modern studies. According to Jody Byrne, translation is probably as old as writing itself since as long as humans are known to have been in existence, they have been known to be translating. To many people, translation developments in the academic field are attributed to the developments in the translation of sacred texts such as the Bible and Koran. However, it has been established that scientific and technical translation has a more significant history from the translation of these texts. This translation has accompanied every aspect of scientific discovery throughout the ages. However, although the traditional translation practices have been significantly in practice, the recent developments borrow most of the ideas from the 15th-century developments. Therefore, the new translation modes can be established through the identification of the role of printing in academic activities. Different libraries across the globe have also anticipated to stock a comprehensive knowledge in dialects that can be understood by many. In this regard, institutions like the Scientific Saudi Translation have realized the importance of translating materials from the English language to the Arabic so that the people in the Middle East can share various pieces of evidence in the region.

The Scientific Saudi institution is the focus of this dissertation. The dissertation also gives an overview of trends and developments in translation studies and translation initiatives in general in the Middle East, to highlighting strengths as well as shortcomings of the Scientific Saudi institution.

The dissertation also identifies the role of technology in translation efforts and how it can impact or improve the quality of the translation. Technology allows for collaboration and collection of translated information from different users across the globe, but it is essential to determine whether the information disseminated is practical or valuable for users. The Scientific Saudi institution analyzed in this dissertation started as a page on social media. The paper undercover the need to examine the impact of e-based in translation efforts. Scientific Saudi's volunteers do not use any computer-assisted translation tool. They depend only on track changes in MS Word Document, although there is a free and open-source CAT tool that they can use such as Matecat.

The workflow of the entire translation job is illustrated in the following figure,

Figure 2 project management systems in scientific Saudi Arabia

As shown in the figure, the Scientific Saudi has an established and transparent project management system, but it is time and effort consuming to do all the work with track changes in Word documents. The volunteers never go through any evaluation test before they start volunteering. As Faris Bukhamsin has said that, "they are given a chance to translate an article and if their translation is bad, we just apologize to them and remove them from our boards on Trello."

The website is not intuitive as it does not have keywords, and the articles are not organized by year or month. One must search the whole website if one is looking for a specific article. The website also does not have profile pages for translators that list all their translations and proofreading jobs. In other words, the website is not exceptionally user-friendly. Although it is a popular initiative and very active on different social media platforms. The followers on all their social media account number 707,760 in total. There are 534k likes on Facebook, 127k followers on Twitter, 40,880 in Instagram, 2,199 listeners on Sound Cloud, and 3,761 subscribers on YouTube.

The Following is the chart for the volunteers' study majors as most of them have majored in Science and the least major in Translation Studies. This reveals that volunteers need more training in...