students strategies in translating culture-specific idioms from english into arabic

Abstract

The present study attempts to investigate the strategies used by second year students of English when translating culture specific English idioms into Arabic. These students experience difficulties in translating the meaning of idiomatic expressions; however, the problem is magnified when students are required not only to understand the meanings of these expressions, but also to render their meanings in another language correctly and appropriately. The study aims also at finding out whether students face any difficulties in choosing the appropriate strategies when translating culture–specific English idioms into Arabic and applying those strategies correctly. The randomly chosen sample for this study consists of 75 second year students at the Department of English. The data are collected by means of a questionnaire administered to teachers of translation and a translation task in the form of sentences, containing idiomatic expressions to be translated by the sample of students. The findings demonstrate that the subjects generally did not face difficulties in recognizing and understanding English idiomatic expressions, but they generally did in determining and applying the appropriate strategies when translating these expressions into Arabic. Students’ lack of awareness about the suitable strategies and the way to apply them successfully is attributed, in part, to the knowledge gap about idioms in both native language and target language cultures. As for the strategies, word for word translation and the paraphrasing strategies are the most successfully used strategies by students in translating culture bound idioms. On the other hand, translation based on idiom by idiom with similar meaning and similar/ dissimilar form and omission are rarely selected and used appropriately.