![]() ![]() So, if you type in just مزارع, Google Translation will only tell you that it means ‘farmer’. This ‘farmer/farms’ problem is indicative of the major drawback of Google Translate: If you type in a single ambiguous word, it will only translate one possibilty. Oddly, while the word has been correctly translated with the more probable option ‘the farmer’, the transliteration goes instead for the ’al-mazaariʕ ‘the farms’ option. When no short vowels are written, this word can be read either as ’al-muzaariʕ ‘the farmer’ or as ’al-mazaariʕ ‘the farms’. If you click on the “listen” icon on Google Translate, you can also listen to the sentence being read, and it actually does it quite well! And there is also a (poor/very imprecise) transliteration of the Arabic, which some people might also find helpful.Īn oddity with the sentence was an inconsistency in the interpretation of the word مزارع. For example, it knows that compound verb forms consisting of two words like كان يتمشّى kaana yatamashshaa ‘strolled, used to stroll’ can be separated by a subject, in this case مزارع ’al-muzaariʕ ‘the farmer’, because it translated the phrase كان المزارع يتمشّى kaana l-muzaariʕ yatamashshaa correctly as ‘the farmer walked’. This sentence shows that Google Translate knows a thing or two about Arabic. I found it to have some great features, in spite of one enormous drawback.įirst I typed in simple Standard Arabic sentence. But since my pupils often tell me they use it, I thought I’d try it out to see how it fares. Although Google Translate can be useful for certain languages and certain tasks, I never really use it for Arabic. Google Translate is the automated translation service that everybody loves to hate. But you will need to use your own morphological analysis skills for those dictionaries.) Google Translate (For that sort of vocabulary, you are better off using the Arabic-English and monolingual Arabic dictionaries on the free Almaany site described below. The only drawbacks of this dictionary I can think of are the fact that you have to pay a subscription fee for it (but come on, it’s practically nothing!) and the absence of some literary and archaic vocabulary. Oxford gives lots of useful examples so you can see the different ways in which a word is used. Sometimes words mean different things in particular contexts. If you click on “see how this word is used” at the top of an Oxford entry, you will be presented with a complete conjugation table, including all persons and numbers and all moods. Then you had to look up all those different possibilities until you found the meaning that fit. ![]() You youngins have no idea how good you have it! Back in the olden days when the only dictionaries were printed on dead trees, one had to look at a word and figure out what all the possible ways it could be analyzed and pronounced. Look at what a good job it did at finding the different possible readings of يجد: But with the Oxford dictionary you can simply type the word in as it appears (no need to add vowels or other diacritics) and it will perform a morphological analysis, listing all of the possibilities. ![]() Especially when reading unvocalized Arabic texts, many words are either hard to analyze (e.g., due to disappearing root consonants or prefixes and suffixes) or ambiguous. If you don’t have your computer configured with an Arabic keyboard (or if you aren’t comfortable typing in Arabic), the Oxford dictionary input field lets you use a point and click keyboard): Note also that tiny little, light blue “listen” icon, which you can click on to hear the pronunciation. At the top of a dictionary entry, all of the basic information about the word is presented clearly, such as the past and present forms, as well as the مصدر maṣdar “verbal noun”, if it is a verb: This dictionary has a lot of nice features of use to the beginner and the more advanced user alike: It is a paid subscription, but it only costs about $20 per year (giving you access to all nine available languages!). This is by far my fav♥rite online bilingual dictionary for Arabic and English. In this article I will discuss four Arabic–English and/or English–Arabic online dictionaries, highlighting their advantages and drawbacks. I am often asked what Arabic dictionaries I can recommend. ![]()
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