Undergraduate Student-Translators’ Difficulties in Translating English Word + Preposition Collocations to Arabic

International Journal of Linguistics Studies (IJLS), 2,2 60-72 (2022)

13 Pages Posted: 12 Aug 2022

Date Written: July 25, 2022

Abstract

English and Arabic have different types of collocations, i.e., groups of words that go together. This study aims to explore the difficulties that Saudi undergraduate student-translators have in translating English word + preposition collocations such as verb + preposition, noun + preposition, and adjective + preposition collocations to Arabic. A corpus of faulty word+ preposition collocations was collected from students-translators’ graduation projects to identify the types of translation errors, translation strategies, sources of translation errors and the contexts in which the translation errors occurred. A comparison of English and Arabic word + preposition collocations showed the following categories: (i) cases were the Arabic word + preposition collocations match those of their English equivalents in form and meaning (depend on يعتمد على,apologize for/toيعتذر لـ/عن, interested inمهتم بـ) ; (ii) cases where a preposition is used in the English collocation but no preposition is used in the Arabic equivalent (wait forينتظر); (iii) cases where an Arabic preposition is used after a word but no such preposition is used in their English equivalent (gave him tea قدم له الشاي, offered him a proposalعرض عليه اقتراح,stopped participatingتوقف عن المشاركة,lacksomethingيفتقر إلى). Results showed that the students mistranslated certain prepositions in word + preposition collocations. In 84% of the errors, the students substituted a preposition in the translation by a faulty one, in 13%, they added a preposition after an Arabic word that does not require a preposition, and in 3% they deleted a preposition from a translation that requires use of a preposition. In addition, 19% of the errors were interlingual (transfer errors from English) and 81% were intralingual due to inadequate competence in L1 (Arabic). 44% were extraneous errors, 21% were due to ignorance of Arabic language rules of preposition use and 18% were due to faulty common use of the preposition in the students’ local dialect. 86% were syntactic; 11% were semantic and 3% were stylistic errors. Results are reported in detail and implications for translation pedagogy are given.

Keywords: Word + preposition collocations, verb + preposition collocations, noun + preposition collocations, adjective + preposition collocations, phrasal verbs, complex prepositions, English-Arabic translation, interlingual errors, intralingual errors.

Suggested Citation

Al-Jarf, Reima, Undergraduate Student-Translators’ Difficulties in Translating English Word + Preposition Collocations to Arabic (July 25, 2022). International Journal of Linguistics Studies (IJLS), 2,2 60-72 (2022), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4171694

Reima Al-Jarf (Contact Author)

King Saud University ( email )

P.O. Box 2460
Saudi Arabia
Riyadh, 11451
Saudi Arabia

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