Building translator-oriented English-Arabic physics glossary from domain corpus

Recent growth in scientific web-content makes it easier for translators to get the most popular equivalent of a scientific term. However, this process is demanding and time-consuming. The aim of this research is to automate the process by building a bilingual glossary for Physics based on the automatic term extraction approach. A domain-specific corpus was built from six websites with recent Arabic scientific articles that were translated by specialists in their respective fields. Then, a basic computational algorithm was applied to the corpus to mine terms along with their translations. The resulting glossary was evaluated by comparing it to existing physics glossaries and it was found out that it outperforms other glossaries in terms of uniformity, recency and availability of authentic usage examples although it includes relatively smaller number of entries. The compiled corpus-based glossary can be a good tool for lexicographers, translators, interpreters, and academicians. It can be used to update existing glossaries with terms that have proven to be of real value to users. This glossary saves language terminologists the problem of having to coin terms that specialists in the field might never use.