Jul 2026· LEARN Journal : Language Education and Acquisition Research Network· Vol 19, pp. 1017· 0 citations· 15 references
TL;DR
The findings demonstrate that while automatic translation can facilitate interlingual and intercultural fan communication, it continues to struggle with the orthographic instability, fan-specific meanings, and pragmatically embedded language use that characterise English loanwords and transliterations in Thai fan tweets.
Abstract
Fan tweets vividly reflect fan register, a distinctive variety of digital language marked by creative and culturally embedded linguistic practices. Among its most salient features in Thai is the use of English loanwords and transliterations. The present study investigates 172 instances of English loanwords and transliterations drawn from two datasets of Thai fan tweets (June 2024-May 2025 and April-May 2026), examining their forms, functions, and rendering in English by automatic translation tool of Twitter (X). Five forms are identified: direct loanwords, semantic extensions, transliterations, hybrid compounds, and clippings and abbreviations, serving five functions: lexical gap filling, in-group identity marking, expressive function, economy of expression, and prestige and modernism. The study further examines how these items are rendered in English by automatic translation, identifying four translation strategies, namely, back-translation, naturalisation, substitution, and deletion, alongside two mechanisms underlying mistranslation: orthographic ambiguity and semantic misinterpretation. The findings demonstrate that while automatic translation can facilitate interlingual and intercultural fan communication, it continues to struggle with the orthographic instability, fan-specific meanings, and pragmatically embedded language use that characterise English loanwords and transliterations in Thai fan tweets, posing barriers to pragmatic equivalence and highlighting the need for developers to address variant spellings, community-specific semantics, and pragmatic context.
The paper argues that NLP should operate as an interpretive assistant rather than an autonomous literary translator in translating Iraqi poetry into English, and proposes a culturally aware, human-in-the-loop framework for supporting literary translation.
Whaj Mneer Esmail· Iraqi Literary and Cultural...· 0 citations
The translation of culture-specific items is difficult not merely because of lexical gaps, but because languages often
organize experience through different underlying cognitive categories. This study examines the Chinese core concept
qi (Gas), a radial category rooted in embodied experience and centered on the prototype of vital energy, and explains
why it is frequently fragmented in English translation. A bilingual database of 49 high-frequency qi-compounds was
built from the Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education and checked
against the Modern Chinese Dictionary and Oxford Learner's Dictionaries. The static morphological comparison
was then supplemented by qualitative analysis of authentic translations from medical classics, philosophy, literary
theory, ethical discourse, and fiction. The results show a systematic mismatch: Chinese organizes the qi-word family
through a shared morpheme and modifier-head construction, with 34 of 49 items placing qi in final position and 37
of 49 exhibiting modifier-head structure. By contrast, English renders these items through morphologically unrelated
simplexes, derivatives, phrases, and one compound, thereby distributing a continuous Chinese category across discrete
lexical domains such as air, strength, anger, courage, integrity, and atmosphere. Translation examples further reveal
metaphorical rupture when the force, container, and flow schemas of qi are replaced by static English entities. To
address this problem, the study proposes a cognitive compensation framework consisting of category transplantation,
semantic compensation, category re-implantation, and context-sensitive modulation. The framework contributes to
cognitive translation studies and offers practical implications for translating and teaching culturally dense Chinese key
concepts in applied language-learning contexts.
Ting Zhang, Zihan Yu· Journal of Applied Language...· 0 citations
Translation plays an important role in transferring meaning across languages, particularly when translating idiomatic expressions whose meanings cannot be interpreted literally. This study aimed to identify the translation strategies employed by sixth-semester students in translating English idiomatic expressions into Indonesian and to investigate the translation difficulties they encountered. The study employed a descriptive quantitative design involving 24 sixth-semester students of the English Department at UIN Fatmawati Sukarno Bengkulu. The research instrument was a translation test consisting of 15 idiomatic expressions selected from Barack Obama's speech Ignorance is Not a Virtue. The students' translations were analyzed using Baker's (1992) translation strategies, while translation difficulties were classified based on Baker (1992) and Larson (1998). The findings revealed that Translation by Paraphrase was the dominant strategy, accounting for 345 translations (95.83%), followed by Using an Idiom of Similar Meaning but Dissimilar Form with 15 translations (4.17%). No data were categorized as Using an Idiom of Similar Meaning and Form or Translation by Omission. Regarding translation difficulties, Contextual Difficulty was the most dominant category with 161 cases (73.85%), followed by Linguistic Difficulty with 33 cases (15.14%) and Cultural Difficulty with 24 cases (11.01%). The findings indicate that students experienced greater difficulty in interpreting the intended meanings of idiomatic expressions within their communicative contexts than in understanding linguistic or cultural aspects. Furthermore, 218 translations (60.55%) were classified as less accurate and inaccurate, indicating that contextual interpretation substantially influenced translation quality. The study suggests that translation instruction should emphasize contextual interpretation alongside linguistic and cultural competence to improve students' ability to translate idiomatic expressions accurately
Verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) poses considerable challenges in translation from English into Arabic, especially when using automated systems where syntactic nuances are often unresolved. This study examines how Neural Machine Translation (NMT) tools and Large Language Models (LLM) process VPE in English-Arabic translation. Using Google Translate (GT) and ChatGPT-4o (GPT-4o) as representatives of each of these technologies, a dataset of 413 English sentences containing instances of VPE was translated into Arabic using both tools. Each output was then analyzed, focusing on accuracy and ellipsis recovery quality with a categorization of translation patterns used in rendering the VPE instances. This study aims to assess how GT and GPT-4o translate English VPE into Arabic, focusing on the accuracy of ellipsis reconstruction and the translation strategies employed. A quantitative comparative method was employed, supported by a frequency-based analysis to determine recurring patterns. The results revealed that both tools employed the same recovery patterns but with different frequencies. GT outperformed GPT-4o in overall accuracy, producing more consistent and contextually appropriate translations. GT successfully used modulation, lexical repetition, and substitution, while GPT-4o heavily used substitution but with many incomplete instances, indicating its lack of ability to make context-dependent inferences. The study underscores the importance of better-quality training data for NMT and LLM tools for both discourse-level processing and context-dependent data. This study offers insights into research on computational linguistics and machine translation with practical implications for translation software developers, Arabic language specialists, and researchers in machine translation assessment.
Eassa Ali, Abbas Brashi, Dana Awad et al.· The International Journal of...· 0 citations
Translating English modal auxiliary verbs into Indonesian presents a unique linguistic challenge because the two languages express modality through entirely different grammatical structures. In literary texts, these verbs do far more than indicate tense or possibility; they are crucial for establishing tone, perspective, and character depth. Despite their narrative weight, modal verbs are often overlooked in English-Indonesian literary translation studies. This study addresses the gap by identifying the core modal auxiliary verbs in Aurélie Moeremans’s memoir Broken Strings and analyzing how they are rendered into Indonesian. Utilizing a descriptive qualitative approach supported by quantitative data, the study tracked nine core modals—can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, and would—through the lens of Molina and Albir’s (2002) translation techniques framework. The analysis revealed 682 total occurrences, with could appearing most frequently at 245 instances (35.92%), followed by would at 216 instances (31.67%). Five specific translation techniques emerged: established equivalent, reduction, transposition, modulation, and variation. Established equivalent was the dominant strategy, used in 382 cases (56.01%), which underscores the translator's strong preference for natural Indonesian phrasing over the rigid preservation of English grammatical forms. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that translating modal verbs relies heavily on contextual nuance and communicative intent, requiring flexible structural and semantic shifts to ensure clarity and readability in the target text.
Lola Deliva, Wahyu Budi· Jurnal Pendidikan dan Sastra...· 0 citations
Translation is the process of substituting text in the target language (TL) for text in the source language (SL). Catford 1965 said determining translation equivalency between two distinct linguistic systems is the main challenge intranslating. This research between Arabic-English translation that is actually has a big differents, aim to the distribution and percentage of pronouns containing in Surah Al-Kahfi, and investigates the translation ideology in the Arabic-English translation of Surah Al-Kahfi. The study using a descriptive qualitative method supported by quantitative analysis or Mixed Methode. The data consist of 532 pronouns identified from the Arabic text and its English translation.The pronouns are classified into personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, attached pronouns, and implicit pronouns. The pronouns are classified into shift type, tehniques type, ideology type and equivalence in translation. Shift type divided into unit shift, structural shift and split spit. Tehniques type divided into literal, transposition, amplification, reduction. Translation Ideology divided into foreignization and domestication, and Equivalence divided into formal and dynamic. The Findings release that Attached Pronoun and Implicit Pronoun are the majority found at the type of pronoun because AlQuran especially Surah Al Kahfi has the uniqe character. There are also Unit Shift has and Structural Shift are the most dominant categoriesat translation shift according to Catford 1965. Furthermore, Domestication appears slightlymore Dominant than foreignization due to Lawrence Venuti 1995 about translation ideology. At the end equivalenece shows that dynamic is more dominant than formal according to Eugene Nida1964. It is shown that reflecting the translator’s tendency to adapt Arabic grammatical structures to English linguistic norms while maintaining selected Qur’anic character.