EFL Learners’ Difficulties in Translating Arabic English Arabic Speech Acts

Abstract

This research aims at shedding light on the difficulties encountered by third year EFL learners at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia-University in translating speech acts from Arabic into English and vice versa. Since EFL learners at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia-University are not taught pragmatics in their three-year accademic syllabus of the Licence, it is assumed that they would face difficulties in identifying and rendering the implied meaning of the speech acts of the original texts, that they would not be aware of the pragmatic and cultural aspects of speech acts in translation, and that their pragmatic competence would negatively affect their translation performance. In order to test the assumptions formulated above, data was collected through two tests administered to 40 third year EFL students at Mohammed Seddik Ben- Yahia University. The findings show that EFL learners encountered difficulties of translation at the pragmatic level, which led them in most instances to translate speech acts from the source language (SL) into the target language (TL) literally to the detriment of pragmatic aspects. This is reflected particularly in their failure to transfer both the function and implied meaning of speech acts from the SL to the TL, in addition to their failure to select the appropriate strategy of translation