Evaluation of Metacognitive Awareness of Translating Idiomatic Expressions

Abstract

The current paper aims to evaluate the metacognitive awareness of translating of idiomatic expressions. Metacognitive awareness is tested through Cognitive Task Analysis (henceforth CTA) and evaluating competencies to solve the translation problems. It is based on the model analyzing the regulatory and executive functions during the translation process. It is hypothesized that the translators have intrinsic competencies to conceptualize the idiomatic expressions in the SL and TL than in bilinguals depending on their expertise, error-monitoring, and attention-control during translation tasks. To resolve this apparent discrepancy between translators and bilinguals, the current study tackles two subject groups; the first involves (translators), and the second includes bilinguals, they were given question forms of idiomatic expressions. Statistics (G factor) was taken as the procedure of data analysis. The study concludes that translators do not have only potential metalinguistic skills, but a subset of metacognitive awareness to the textual material. Bilinguals, on the other hand, have metalinguistic skills to come up with the patterns of conceptualizing idiomatic expressions.