Error Assessment in the Translation of Some English Collocations into Arabic: A Case Study of English Department Students at University of Benghazi, EL-Marj Campus, Libya.

Abstract

One of the main issues that encounter translation learners in the field of translation is collocation. This work aims to identify the students’ deficiencies when attempting to render some English collocations into Arabic. This is done through identifying the major problems that students face when rendering collocations from English into Arabic. Another aim of this work is to discover if there is a difference in meaning in terms of the frequency of a word in the English collocation when rendering into the target, Arabic. Examining these issues depended on a collection of some English collocations samples to be rendered into Arabic. The subjects were undergraduate students from English department, University of Benghazi, EL-Marj Campus. They were chosen randomly from Semester seven. The reason for choosing this semester is that they should have a strong background on English culture, and they have tackled different subjects regarding English cultural and linguistic disparities in their past semesters. They were given two hours to translate these collocations into Arabic. Only general English-Arabic dictionaries were allowed. i.e ‘not collocation dictionaries’ in order to see how these students can transfer them into English and what are the problems they might encounter. Their samples were analysed and recommendations were made in this study.