Investigating the difficulties encountered by Students of Foreign Languages while Translating from English to Arabic: Case of Second and Third Year Students in the Department of English at Tiaret University

Abstract

This research is entitled″ investigating the difficulties which students of foreign languages encounter while translating from English to Arabic″ .The translation process is a very sensitive and subtle task of language studies; it involves some serious issues to deal with. However, it becomes a more complex task when we translate from English to Arabic. As English and Arabic are of different and distant origins, any translation from one script into the other poses a lot of difficulties such as in the areas of vocabulary, grammar, sound, style and usage. The present paper attempts to find out the problems that second and third-year students meet in the process of translation from English into Arabic, and the strategies they employ and resort to whenever they come across any difficulty. It can be seen that this is the qualitative research. The research work examines, through a test and questionnaire, it is clearly demonstrated that they like translation, but they meet some problems; of lexical nature. The results show that, the students' solutions resort to some strategies like guessing the meaning form the context, using approximate synonym, or just leaving it empty.