Résumé:
The current work is an attempt to investigate the effectiveness of using the monolingualand
bilingual dictionaries on learners' vocabulary retention when translating English Arabic texts.
More precisely, the aim of this study is to identify which sort of dictionaries is more helpfulfor
learners to construct and expand their vocabularies. Besides, it tries to demonstrateto learners
what dictionary to use to translate texts from English into Arabic. This workis based on the
hypothesisthat if EFL learners use monolingual dictionaries instead of bilingual ones for the
purpose of translating English Arabic texts, they will acquire far more vocabulary. The current
research is a case study. We have adopted an experimental research design based on an
experiment. We used one data collection tool which is the experiment. The experiment
comprised three stages, the pre-test, the treatment, and the post-test. To conduct the experiment,
we chose fifty second yearEFL students at the department of English at Mohammed Seddik
Benyahia University from the whole population which is slightly above two hundred and fifty
students. When translating English Arabic texts, learners would inevitably tend to rely on an
English Arabic dictionary to reveal the meanings of certain ambiguous words. That is the result
of the existence of ready equivalents in such type of dictionaries. Besides, monolingual
dictionaries seem to be less useful in the domain of translation. Explaining a word in the same
language would enable the learner to have an understanding of the meaning of the word,
however, this would raise another challenge for learners to find the right equivalent in the
language to which they aretranslating. The findings of the research revealed that monolingual
dictionaries help learners to widen their vocabulary more than bilingual dictionaries. This has
revealed the usefulness of monolingual dictionaries in the domain of translation. The learners
are henceforth advised to use monolingual dictionaries when translating English Arabic texts
for its usefulness as a translational tool and its effectiveness for broadening learner’s
vocabulary.
