Investigating Web-Translations of Pakistani Public Offices
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14751258Keywords:
Languages, Web Translations, Localization, Language PolicyAbstract
Purpose: This empirical study investigated the web-translations of five Pakistani public offices (FPSC, FIA, HEC, USB, and Ministry of Finance) offering Urdu tab as an option to access information on their official websites.
Design/Methodology/Approach: Triangulation of quantitative and qualitative research design informed the researcher of the semantic, lexical and syntactic caveats in these translations. Three phased research model helped the researcher explore thoroughly and assess the translation quality based on functional componential model. The study hypothesized that majority of the Pakistani population is oblivious of the Supreme Court’s amendments in language policy concerning national and official language; hence, Urdu web-translations of the public departments have not been accessed effectively. Firstly, the researcher conducted an online survey, comprising of two sections, close ended and short answer based questions. The sample size was 87 participants, 66 participants who had never browsed these websites, submitted the form after first section and the remaining 21 continued to the next section giving their feedback on the translated sites. Secondly, the researcher compiled corpus of the five selected websites in a tabular form to compare the data. Thirdly, the administrators of the departments had been contacted regarding the methods of translation and the expertise of the personnel involved.
Findings: More than 90% of the sample is unaware of the multilingual national policy of Pakistan. Only 44% responded in affirmative that they were aware of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling about official language and only half of this percentage had browsed these Urdu versions of the websites. Some offices have been using computer assisted machine translations (CAT) through google translator that uses statistical machine translation (SMT) model. The corpus was assessed for TQA after examining the lexical, semantic, syntactical and technical alignment inaccuracies and imperfections. Urdu Science Board’s web-translations scored maximum i.e. 65/100 on TQA tally sheet. Whereas, FPSC and FIA scored only 25 and HEC scored the least i.e. 20 as this website is inadequate and not functional yet thus have defected target language (TL) and practically and textually inadequate.
Implications/Originality/Value: The study suggests the public offices to invest in their Urdu webs by either hiring expert translators or engaging expertise of a translation agency for this project to offer quality translation to public.
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