An Analysis of the Problems Encountering Libyan Pre-service Translators in the Faculty of Arts, the University of Benghazi, in Translating Arabic Texts into English

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the deficiencies that translation students encounter when transferring texts from their L1, Arabic, into English, their L2. They make mistakes when they translate in terms of syntactic, non-equivalent lexical, and synonymy errors. Another aim of this study is to review the literature focusing on the interference of the translator’s L1 in the translation process and therefore its impact on the translation outputs. In order to investigate this interference, we have collected five Arabic sentences from the internet. Ten randomly students of English were chosen as a sample of this study from Semester four at the University of Benghazi (El-Marj Campus). They were asked to translate these sentences into English without consulting other people. Only Arabic-English dictionaries were allowed in order to see how they could deal with them. The results of this investigation showed that these students failed to provide good translations of these sentences due to the interference of their mother language, Arabic, to the translation process.