Localization of Terms Associated with the Covid-19 Pandemic from English to Arabic: A Study of Linguistic Means and Machine Translation Techniques

Abstract

The emergency conditions experienced by the world during the COVID-19 pandemic have led to radical changes in both the lexicographic and semantic levels of the Arabic language. As with other languages around the world, Arabic had to keep up with the rapid development and massive flow of information and to be able to localize the terminology associated with the pandemic in the English language as the dominant global language, especially in the scientific field. The period of the COVID-19 virus outbreak and its accompanying effects and developments witnessed the production of a huge number of newly coined terms in the English language, which posed a major challenge for Arabic translators and required them to search for linguistic means to localize these new terms, ranging from derivation and borrowing to translation and the use of machine translation techniques based on artificial intelligence programs."