Abstract
<p>This study investigated some linguistic errors committed by Jordanian EFL undergraduate students when translating news headlines in Jordanian newspapers from Arabic to English and vice versa. The data of the study was collected through a test composed of (30) English news headlines and (30) Arabic ones covering various areas of news occurring in a large corpus of Jordanian newspapers, i.e., two leading and prominent newspapers were selected. The test was administrated to a randomly selected sample consisting of (40 female, 20 male) third and fourth year undergraduate students in the Department of English Language and Literature in the Faculty of Educational Sciences and Arts at UNRWA University in Amman, Jordan. Results from the first analysis of the translated Arabic news headlines indicated that the EFL students had grammatical and lexical errors respectively. The second analysis of the translated Arabic news headlines showed that the EFL students had inadequate knowledge of the English headlines rules. The analysis of the translated English headlines revealed that the EFL students’ main difficulties were grammatical followed by discoursal and lexical types. In light of these results, the researcher proposes a number of pedagogical recommendations related to translating news headlines and future research<em>.</em></p>
Highlights
In this contemporary and hi-tech revolutionary period of time, mass media – whether written, broadcast, or spoken–are considered highly prominent means for continuously providing and transferring news, ideas, information, and facts to a large number of readers, listeners or viewers all around the world
This study investigated some linguistic errors committed by Jordanian EFL undergraduate students when translating news headlines in Jordanian newspapers from Arabic to English and vice versa
For the analysis of the errors extracted from the translated Arabic news headlines, the linguistic taxonomy of errors which was used by Keshavarz was adopted, and for the analysis of the participants’ errors drawn from the translated Arabic and English news headlines, the lexical and syntactic features of new headlines were applied
Summary
In this contemporary and hi-tech revolutionary period of time, mass media – whether written, broadcast, or spoken–are considered highly prominent means for continuously providing and transferring news, ideas, information, and facts to a large number of readers, listeners or viewers all around the world. The headline, in any kind of mass media, is conventionally defined as “the title of a newspaper report, which is printed in large letters above the report and the most important points of the main news stories that are read at the beginning of a newspaper on radio or television” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2003) To put it differently, the headlines have an extremely critical and privileged position, heading the newspapers, reports or articles with a distinct layout and typography in order to present the main ideas as well as the most crucial information that the readers want to know through few, condensed, and well-selected words (Gorjian et al, 2013; Hendar, 2012; Lee, 2012; Petronienė & Žvirblytė, 2012; Uppuleti & Ganta, 2015). The news headlines in the newspapers form a special subgenre of mass media which present high compressed and condensed news set with special linguistic features, contributing to arise many challenges to the ESL/EFL students and to some native speakers
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