COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted teaching in a vriety of institutions. It has tested the readiness of academic institutions to deal with such abrupt crisis. Online learning has become the main method of instruction during the pandemic in Jordan. After 4 months of online education, two online surveys were distributed to investigate faculty’s and Students’ perception of the learning process that took place over that period of time with no face to face education. In this regard, the study aimed to identify both faculty’s and students’ perceptions of online learning, utilizing two surveys one distributed to 50 faculty members and another 280 students were selected randomly to explore the effectiveness, challenges, and advantages of online education in Jordan. The analysis showed that the common online platforms in Jordan were Zoom, Microsoft Teams offering online interactive classes, and WhatsApp in communication with students outside the class. The study found that both faculty and students agreed that online education is useful during the current pandemic. At the same time, its efficacy is less effective than face-to-face learning and teaching. Faculty and students indicated that online learning challenges lie in adapting to online education, especially for deaf and hard of hearing students, lack of interaction and motivation, technical and Internet issues, data privacy, and security. They also agreed on the advantages of online learning. The benefits were mainly self-learning, low costs, convenience, and flexibility. Even though online learning works as a temporary alternative due to COVID-19, it could not substitute face-to-face learning. The study recommends that blended learning would help in providing a rigorous learning environment.

Purpose The spread of Covid-19 has led to the closure of educational institutions worldwide, forcing academic institutions to find online platforms. The purpose of this paper is to accelerate the development of the online learning (OL) environments within those institutions. The Covid-19 pandemic has unfolded the extent of the academic institutions' readiness to deal with such a crisis. Design/methodology/approach In this vein, the study aimed to identify the perception of translation instructors in teaching translation courses online during Covid-19, using a questionnaire to explore the strategies and challenges of teaching and assessing students' performance. The analysis revealed instructors' reliance on Zoom and Microsoft Teams in offering virtual classes and WhatsApp in communication with students outside the class. Findings The findings revealed the relative effectiveness of online education, but its efficacy is less than face-to-face learning according to the respondents' views. It was also found that students faced difficulties in OL, which lie in adapting to the online environment, lack of interaction and motivation and the deficiency of data connections. Even though online education could work as an aid during Covid-19, but it could not replace face-to-face instruction. Based on the findings, the study recommended blended learning. Combining online education with face-to-face instruction, i.e. face-to-face plus synchronous and asynchronous, would result in a rigorous OL environment. Originality/value The research is genuine and there is no conflict of interest.

The world is facing an unprecedented virus outbreak, COVID-19, hitting more than 200 countries. Governments have been striving to prevent the spread of the virus through the lockdown. During the strict lockdown in Jordan, people needed to stay home, and they used available social networks to keep updated on COVID-19, with Facebook, the most popular social media platform. The study aimed to elicit information about assessing the use of FTS as a source of information in general and on COVID-19, in particular, FTS for those interested in English posts. However, it cannot read them and how reliable users think FTS is. The questionnaire was sent through the available networking sites, such as Facebook Messenger. The study found that 94.3% use Facebook daily; 87.1% of the participants activated Facebook Translation Service (FTS). It is found that 62.2% of the participants considered Facebook as a primary source of information regarding COVID-19 and 27.8% as secondary source. In terms of FTS usage, 87.3% used FTS in translating English Facebook posts into Arabic, and 83.8% used FTS in translating English Facebook COVID-19 posts into Arabic during the lockdown. On the other hand, it is found that the majority found FTS committed minor errors in terms of adequacy and fluency. This success is due to the usage of Neural Machine Translation (NMT)approach and bilingual text corpora. The advantage is that FTS is a well-trained database that can provide more accurate translation than other model. In conclusion, disregarding FTS output quality, our research shows that Facebook and FTS became a significant source of information during abrupt crises. Such research would encourage government officials to better use Facebook and FTS as complements to their national health campaigns.

Machine Translation (MT) has the potential to provide instant translation in times of crisis. MT provides real solutions that can remove borders between people and COVID-19 information. The widespread of MT system makes it worthy of scrutinizing the capacity of the most prominent MT system, Google Translate, to deal with COVID-19 texts into Arabic. The study adopted (Costa et al., 2015a) framework in analysing the output of Google Translate output service in terms of orography, grammar, lexis, and semantics. The study's corpus was extracted from World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). The paper reveals that Google Translate committed a set of errors: semantic, grammatical, lexical, and punctuation. Such errors inhibit the intelligibility of the translated texts. It also indicates that MT might work as an aid to translate general information about COVID-19, but it is still incapable of dealing with critical information about COVID-19. The paper concludes that MT can be an effective tool, but it can never replace human translators.

Abstract-Online machine translation (OMT) systems are widely used throughout the world freely or at low cost. Most of these systems use statistical machine translation (SMT) that is based on a corpus full with translation examples to learn from them how to translate correctly. Online automatic machine translation systems differ widely in their effectiveness and accuracy. Therefore, the wide spread of such translation platforms make it necessary to evaluate the output in order to shed light on the capacity and usability of each system. The present study have selected the most prominent translation systems, Google and Microsoft to test which system is better and more reliable in rendering English<>Arabic translation. To conduct the study, the researcher has chosen automatic evaluation of the two system outputs by using the most popular automatic evacuation metric BLEU. The study's corpus consists of 25 Arabic sentences extracted from Petra News Agency of Jordan with its human reference translation from the English version of Petra. The result of the research showed that Google translate achieves better results than Microsoft Bing in comparison to human referenced translation. However, Machine Translation (MT) is still far from reaching fully automatic translation of a quality obtained by human translators.