student' dDifficulties in translating similes from araboc literary prose texts into English

Abstract

The present study investigated the difficulties third year EFL learners face when translating similes from Arabic literary prose into English. In this case, figures of speech, similes, have an important role, as they include figurative meaning besides their literary meaning. This study aims to provide an acount of similes in Arabic as well as in English. It is a humble attempt that may serve as an exploration of the problems caused by Arabic similes when translating them into English. It also tries to find out the strategies the students would follow when dealing with Similes, and how they fail to notice this rhetorical device may lead to wrong translations. The study hypothesizes that the difficulties the students encounter when translating literary prose are resulting from their ignorance of the importance of using appropriate methods provide a high quality translation, in addition to their failure in chosing good images.To achieve the aims of the study and investigate the validity of the hypotheses, similes have been studied in the works of Gebran khalil Gibran, then passages and expressions from Gebran’s complete works has been selected and given to 40 of 3rd year students in a form of a test to be the data of the study, in addition to an interview with 02 teachers of translation and a students questionnaire