Evaluation of Facebook Translation Service (FTS) in Translating Facebook Posts from English into Arabic in Terms of TAUS Adequacy and Fluency during Covid-19

The study aims to verify the capacity of Facebook Translation Service in translating English Facebook posts into Arabic in terms of two criteria: adequacy and fluency in line with the Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) scales. To ensure consistency and objectivity as recommended by TAUS, six evaluators, native speakers of Arabic and near-native speakers of English, rated the same data on each scale. The evaluators were acquainted with fluency and adequacy scales along with MT limitations and potentials. Once the corpus was uploaded and sent to the evaluators using TAUS tools, they had to assign scores online on 1-4 rating scales. Then, each report was displayed online on the TAUS reports tool. Evaluators’ responses were combined in thematic categories and were calculated to obtain frequencies and percentages. The study found that FTS provided fluent output with highest percentage of the scale good equal to 3 on a scale from 1 to 4, where the output is assessed as flowing smoothly with minor linguistic errors. Moreover, FTS succeeded in generating an adequate output with the highest percentage of responses as ‘most’ equal to 3 on a scale from 1 to 4, where almost the full meaning of the source is deemed to be transferred in the target language. This study is useful since it highlights the role of Facebook Translation service in translating, educating the public and fighting COVID-19. Consequently, such research would encourage the use and research on the potentiality of MT and FTS in dealing with abrupt crises, such as COVID-19.