Overview of deep learning and large language models in machine translation: a special perspective on the Arabic language

Abstract This work aims to present an overview of using some artificial intelligence (AI) models in machine translation (MT). This work aims to integrate machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), large language models (LLMs) to enhance machine translation between natural languages. The focus is directed to present the neural-based machine translation (NMT), and some DL models are presented. The bidirectional-encoder-representation from transformer (BERT) and LLMs are presented to utilize the big amount of textual data to learn translation patterns. The main measurable criteria that are used to evaluate the performance of MT and Arabic machine translation (AMT) are also presented. Some linguistic and technical challenges of MT and AMT are discussed. Some key points of future works in NMT are mentioned. A comparative study among some recent published related works is presented. A critical survey is presented to show the important role of DL and LLMs in MT. Some open-source toolkits, datasets and some commercial MT systems are collected and briefly presented. This work is expected to be useful for those people interested to know the up-to-date knowledge of MT and the potential role of DL and LLM in automatic translation.