The Emotional Semantic Shift in the Machine Translation of the Song Qalbi Fil Madinah by Maher Zain & Harris J through ChatGPT
Emotional Semantic Shift in the Machine Translation of the Song Qalbi Fil Madinah by Maher Zain & Harris J through ChatGPT
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32699/fx5bs604Keywords:
Arabic song translation, ChatGPT, Emotional meaning shift, Munday Theory, Semantic studyAbstract
This study departs from the assumption that emotional meanings such as affection, longing, and spirituality are highly sensitive to linguistic and cultural changes, and therefore often undergo attenuation or shift in the process of translation. The research examines the phenomenon of emotional meaning shifts in the machine translation of the Arabic religious song Qalbi Fil Madinah by Maher Zain and Harris J into Indonesian using ChatGPT. Employing a descriptive qualitative method grounded in Munday’s (2012) theory, this study analyzes how ChatGPT transfers affective and spiritual nuances from the source text to the target text. The data consist of Arabic song lyrics and their machine-generated translations, purposively selected based on their emotional and spiritual content. The analysis focuses on four types of emotional meaning shifts as outlined in Munday’s (2016) semantic theory: intensification, attenuation, polarity change, and neutralization. Based on the findings, ChatGPT demonstrates strong grammatical accuracy and structural cohesion but tends to neutralize emotional intensity and spiritual resonance particularly in metaphorical and culturally bound expressions. It is concluded that, despite the high linguistic flexibility of generative language models, their ability to preserve emotional equivalence across languages and cultures remains limited. This research highlights the urgency of evaluating machine translation performance in conveying the emotional and spiritual content of religious texts to maintain meaning equivalence. The findings also pave the way for the development of a new evaluation framework that assesses not only semantic adequacy but also cross-linguistic emotional fidelity, thereby contributing to the theoretical advancement of semantic–pragmatic studies through the application of Munday’s emotion-based meaning shift model in the context of AI-driven translation.
Keywords: Arabic song translation, ChatGPT , Emotional meaning shift, Munday Theory, Semantic study
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