Author:Ike, Nneka Francisca
Date: 20/02/2026
The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in translation has raised important questions about its ability to preserve meaning in culturally rich literary texts. This study examined the extent to which Grok AI and Google's Gemini AI preserve semantic meaning, pragmatic force, cultural fidelity, and orthographic consistency in the back-translation of selected excerpts from Nke M Ji Ka by G. I. Nwozuzu (2013). It also compared the effectiveness of the two systems in handling proverbs, ritual discourse, indigenous religious concepts, kinship expressions, and other culturally embedded elements. Adopting a qualitative descriptive design, selected Igbo excerpts were translated into English by the researcher and subsequently back-translated into Igbo using Grok AI and Google's Gemini AI. The generated texts were then compared with the original Igbo versions using Baker's (1992) Theory of Pragmatic Equivalence as the analytical framework. The analysis focused on the preservation of semantic meaning, communicative intention and cultural significance. The findings reveal that both systems generally preserved basic semantic meaning but encountered considerable difficulties in maintaining pragmatic meaning, cultural fidelity, and orthographic accuracy. Proverbs, idiomatic expressions, ritual utterances, and indigenous religious concepts proved particularly challenging. Grok AI demonstrated stronger lexical correspondence and cultural retention, whereas Gemini AI occasionally achieved better semantic reconstruction but produced more non-standard forms, orthographic inaccuracies, and inappropriate lexical substitutions. The study concludes that although AI translation systems show significant potential for Igbo translation, they remain limited in preserving the deeper cultural and pragmatic dimensions of literary discourse. Human review therefore remains essential for ensuring the accurate translation of culturally embedded texts.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Back-translation, Pragmatic Equivalence, Cultural Fidelity, Grok AI, Gemini AI.
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