Undergraduates' Difficulties in Translating some Arabic Collocational Lexical Items with Regard to the Production of Verb – Noun English Collocation

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the knowledge of undergraduate students in rendering a range of Arabic lexical collocations into English in different contexts properly, depending on the students' mental linguistic repertoire. It also examined the strategies practiced in their translation to come up with the proper collocation. The study used two main tools. A questionnaire was responded by students and teachers, also a test for students only. The participants were thirty (30) Yemeni students studying at the Department of English, Faculty of Education–Saber and six (6) of the translation course university teachers. The students' knowledge of collocations was measured by a Translation Test of three Arabic lexical collocational items (ضرب - حصر - تخفيف) which were contextualized in fifteen sentences, each of which contained a verb-noun collocation. The results of the statistical analysis showed that there was a negative knowledge of collocations and that the third year B.A. students face difficulty in finding out the exact equivalents and collocation. They were not collocationally competent and they really found difficulty in selecting the words that come together to form good English sentences. Therefore, they violated the system of collocations. As a result, they were not able to produce a correct English sentence. The results also showed that the students tend to depend on different language strategies to facilitate their translation such as L1 transfer, synonymy, avoidance, and paraphrasing. These strategies lead to poor English translation. Accordingly, some suggestions are put forward to overcome the stated problems.