Effects of Using Culture-laden Texts on Culture-specific Translation Skills in Arab Students

Abstract

This work explores the possibility of translating culture-laden texts from English into Arabic, relying on a corpus of literary texts representing the local cultures of the 16th. and the 18th. century England. Furthermore, it taps into the applicability of SL cultural texts to help students appropriately render a culture-specific lexicon. The present study makes use of an experimental research design to check whether the use of literary texts may help EFL learners enhance their culture-specific translation skills in a traditional instruction setting. Finally, its findings indicate that the use of culture-laden literary texts can be efficient in introducing the culturally loaded lexicon of the English language, thereby inducing improvements in translational writing skills of EFL learners of translation.