Abstract
The present cross-sectional empirical study investigates the different types of strategies and methods that the undergraduate students employ when translating from their native language into the target language and vice versa. The study was conducted on one hundred twenty, third and fourth year, students at the College of Science and Arts, King Khalid University. The data were collected through translation tasks and questionnaires. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to analyze and interpret the data collected to achieve the objectives of this study. The study revealed valuable information. The most favored strategies by Arab college students were literal translation, free translation and word-for-word translation respectively. More than half of the all used strategies were literal translation with a percentage of about fifty-five. The mixed translation strategies were found to be about twenty one percent for all the three levels. Free translation strategy was only fourteen percent which is, somehow, a low percentage. The students showed considerable improvement as they progress from one level to a higher one. It is expected that translation instructors as well as course designers will reflect on the findings of this study by raising the learners’ awareness of the great differences between English and Arabic when teaching or designing translation courses. Parallel texts that include literal translation as well as free translation have to be included to show the deficiency and ungrammaticality of the texts produced when applying literal translation.
Highlights
Communication between people of different tongues and different cultures would not be that easy if there is no translation
Translation is defined almost the same in all dictionaries. It is defined in the Longman Dictionary of American English as ‘to change speech or writing from one language to another’ (Longman 2008, p. 1067), in the Oxford Dictionary of Current English, to translate is to ‘express the sense of in another language or in another form’ (p. 971) and in Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (2016, p. 14098) ‘The act of rendering meaning into another language’
Another study was conducted by Amina (2017) to identify the strategies utilized when translating English advertisement slogans into Arabic in which the findings showed that free translation was the most frequent strategy used by translators when translating the English advertisements slogans followed by literal translation, which according to him, was as effective and accurate as those of the original
Summary
Communication between people of different tongues and different cultures would not be that easy if there is no translation. 14098) ‘The act of rendering meaning into another language’ What different scholars such as Nida (1964), Catford (1965), Hatem and Mason (1990), Newmark (2001) believe about translation do not differ much from the definitions mentioned in most of the dictionaries. 12) points out that translation is a process in which the translator attempts to convey the message as accurate and appropriate as that in the source language both in terms of meaning and style. He argues that the cultural differences between the source and the target languages may cause complications for translators more than the linguistic or structural differences can do. All aspects of language such as meaning, grammar, style and sounds enjoy the same importance in the process of translation where failing to observe any one of them will lead to distorting of meaning
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