Google and Legal Translation: The Case Study of Contracts

In recent years, the need for Machine Translation (MT) has grown, especially for translating legal contracts between languages like Arabic and English. This study primarily investigates whether Google Translator can adequately replace human translation for legal documents. Utilizing a widely popular free web-based tool, Google Translate, the research method involved translating six segments from various legal contracts into Arabic and assessing the translations for lexical and syntactic accuracy. The findings show that although Google Translate can quickly produce English-Arabic translations, it falls short compared to professional translators, especially with complex legal terms and syntax. Errors can be categorized into: polysemy, homonymy, legal doublets, and adverbs at the linguistic level, and morphological parsing, concord, and modality at the syntactic level. The study concludes with recommendations for enhancing machine translation systems and suggests caution in using Google Translate for legal purposes, advocating for continued reliance on human expertise in legal settings.