Investigating Contrastive Grammar Problems Iraqi EFL Learners Face in English-Arabic Translation

Abstract

English and Arabic have many similarities and differences with regard to grammar. Consequently, the current paper is designed to investigate the grammatical problems that Iraqi EFL learners suffer from through the process of translation from English to Arabic. It draws upon contrastive analysis (CA) to help in solving the problems which encounter Iraqi EFL morning and evening learners. It aims at examining the contrastive grammatical difficulties and problems that Iraqi EFL learners encounter in English-Arabic translation; presenting a test for identifying the grammatical problems that EFL learners face in English-Arabic translation; providing solutions for such problems. It uses a translation test that consists of 20 items for testing one hundred EFL learners of English department for morning studies and another one hundred for evening studies, college of Education, University of Thi-Qar for the academic year 2022-2023. The test is analysed and discussed. After implementing and discussing the test, the study concluded that hypothesis (1) is verified that the errors students committed are classified as being interlingual or intralingual; hypothesis (2) also verified that here are some aspects in English have no equivalents in Arabic; hypothesis (3) is refuted since tenses and the emphatic do take the highest number of errors that EFL learners (morning and evening participants) commit in English-Arabic translations; hypothesis (4) is partially accepted is partially accepted because of the other simple problems in Arabic-English translation. It is concluded that the majority of Iraqi EFL learners suffer from the tenses, emphatic do, word order, and sentence connectors in English-Arabic translation and both morning and evening students do not suffer from big problems in translating the gerund, Od and Oi, conditional sentences, negation, adjectives, medal auxiliaries, prepositions, and articles in English-Arabic translation