What are the reasons behind the failure of machine-translation initiatives when it comes to the Arabic language?

If there is failure as you have said, then it is simply because it is a "machine" translation. A machines can never does the work of man as it is done by man!

Arabic translation is very difficult in " machine translation " because in arabic language there is words which can't be translated into english or other language staight away. Arabic language has a lot of klishes and each word has a lot of meanings which can't be translated without context.

The first problem is d impenetrability of some Arabic words which puzzles their decomposition into morphemes. The seconds the incompatibility of existing machine translation techniques with the arabic language. The degree of difficulty can easily be observed by the checking the results of any artless round the machine translation arbitrary arabic text. Even the most advanced technology that are available today are challenged regardless of whether the round trip is arabic to english, to arabic or english to arabic, to English. The inevitable outcome is disenchanting, this leads to an even more disappointing conclusion. That is as long as no drastic improvement are made, one must not take output of any machine translation of arabic to orthodox. Yet another disappointing fact is that most of the intelligent machine are built to produce woodenly literal or paraphrased translations. Thanks

The machine teanslation of Arabic is bery basic. In simple words, Many words are used differently and serve for sifferent meaning/metaphores but when a sustem yranslates it, they look for the very basic and there is no correlation found with the meaning and the translation. Also, the structure is NEVER put in order according the regulations of Arabic.