The Translation of Polysemous Words from English into Arabic

Abstract

The present study attempts to investigate the translation of polysemous words by EFL third year studentsat the University of Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia of polysemous words from English into Arabic, shedding light on the difficulties encountered by these students in the rendition of this kind of words. It was assumed in this study that the difficulties third year EFL students at the University of Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia faced in translating polysemous words were due to both comprehension and rendition problems, that they relied on the primary meaning in translating polysemous words from English into Arabic to the detriment of context, and that they disregarded the extended meanings of the polysemous wordin translation. The data were collected by means of a questionnaire and a translation test administered to EFL third year studentsat the University of Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia. The findings of the study demonstrated that the difficulties that third year EFL students at the University of Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia faced were mainly due to comprehension problems of the extended meanings of the source polysemous words, and sometimes to rendition problems. The findings also showed that the students generally relied on the primary meaning of the target polysemous words to the detriment of the context, even though this did not convey the meaning intended from the polysemous word in question, which in turn resulted in none-sense translations, and that they often disregarded the extended meanings of the polysemous word, rushing to interpret it in its core meaning, whichled them to erroneously translate it.