Issues and Perspectives on The Electronic Translation of Shipping Incoterms: FOB as a case study

Abstract

The international commercial terms are officially known as Incoterms. These trade rules, established by ICC (the International Chamber of Commerce) are written and pronounced in English. Mastering their use is necessary to circumvent any confusion in the meaning, and to avoid any misunderstanding between the contracting parties. These incoterms are universally agreed upon, except for the United States where a difference in their meaning is noticed, mainly the incoterm FOB (Free on Board). Although they are mandated as multinational business terms, they do not regulate the transfer of ownership of the merchandise nor the sale price. Despite the difference in their meanings, it should be noted that they constitute broad lines for commercial exchanges between countries. Some of their advantages are: The distribution of costs related to export and import, the distribution of documents between the seller and the buyer, and the conditions for the delivery of goods. They are stated to enable trading partners to reach markets throughout the world. To apply incoterms for overseas shipment, maritime transport companies need to make sure that their staff understand them clearly to avoid any costly mistakes in the process of transactions. Collaboration with educational institutions and training courses are required. Both current and future Algerian professionals in the field need to be assisted on how to use incoterms. This research paper deals with the use of shipping incoterms when training the students, who are specialized in maritime trade, for a future profession as a maritime leader or dealer. As the incoterms are basically written and pronounced in English, the use of a translating method, that allows them to identify and understand the meaning of linguistic terms, is required. Bearing in mind the fact that artificial intelligence covers a wide range of outputs nowadays, it has been necessary to ask the following question: Could the T M (translation machine) provide the students a faithful translation of incoterms? In an attempt to answer this question, the following hypotheses were formulated: Teaching EOP (English for occupational purposes) in the Algerian maritime sector focuses on translating the international commercial terms. Machine translation provides a faithful meaning of words and sentences. As the software performs translation for a specific language or domain, it produces a high-quality output. To check these hypotheses, it is essential to go through the MT translation method for it is mostly used by the learners as it is free from any charges. The MT (Machine Translation) method is what a computer program produces. To fulfil a translation, the text is simply entered or pasted in and the languages are selected. Google Translation is a well-known example of this type of translation. The use of this software enables the students to substitute mechanically and quickly words from one language to another. It exempts them from any human linguistic intervention. Though it provides free and instant translations, it produces incoherent wording. The present study reveals that different electronic sites do not give the same translation for the incoterm FOB. One way of evaluating the quality of machine translation is when the human translator reviews the output to ensure that it is linguistically correct. This review is referred to as the post-editing machine translation. When adopting this method, a good quality of translation is achieved; grammatical errors are fixed, unclear and confusing wording and mistranslations are cleared up.