Awareness of BA Translation Students of the Arabic Grammatical Aspects and their Translations into English: A Comparative Study

Abstract

This paper aims at measuring the extent of some translation students' competence of grammatical aspect compounds (strings) and their adequacy in rendering them in English. It also tries to establish which strings students tend to mistranslate. The researchers designed a multiple-choice test, using Google form, in which a given Arabic text is provided with four alternatives: one correct answer and three distractors. The test was distributed to students from translation departments at Yarmouk University and the German Jordanian University enrolled in the second semester, 2020 via the E-learning systems. Responses of students (202 out of 300 from YU and 63 out of 86 from GJU) were collected in tables. The researchers used One-way ANOVA and Scheffe Test to analyze the data. The paper has concluded that there are no significant differences among students with regard to gender, study plan, level of study, and taking Arabic courses traditionally taught. However, students joining Yarmouk University and the German-Jordan University from international and private schools are better than those coming from public schools. The majority of students do not have problems with the simple present and simple future and their perfective and progressive aspects, nor do they with past perfect. However, they confuse the perfective and progressive aspects of the simple present and the simple past. Keywords: Grammatical aspects, Arabic grammar, English grammar, Translation Yarmouk University, German-Jordanian University.