Critical discourse analysis of linguistic and cultural obstacles in English -Arabic Translation among EFL Students

Abstract

The research at hand attempts to investigate the linguistic and cultural obstacles and difficulties that English forgein language learners face during the translation process, especially when they translate texts, idioms and cultural expressions from Arabic language to English language and the other way around. This study consists of three main chapters, the first chapter provides different definitions of the concepts of language, culture and translation in addition to shed the light on the different translation methods and strategies according to several scholars, the second chapter introduces the different linguistic and cultural obstacles that translators may face in the process of translation, along with mentioning specific translation strategies to overcome the translation obstacles, and the last chapter introduces the used instruments and tools to collect data and analyse the results using the critical discourse analysis, which is the appropriate approach in analysing texts and their relation to socio-cultural practices, since this research focuses on describing, interpreting and explaining the translation problems that come against English Forgein Language students during the operation of translation. The product and the process analyses reveal that the most common difficulties faced by the 3rd year students are the misuse of translation strategies and the ambiguity and misunderstanding of expressions in terms of pragmatic competence, the lack of vocabulary, the linguistic untranslatability of some expressions, and the grammatical differences of languages in terms of linguistic competence, while the gap between languages and cultures, the limited cultural background of the source language, the lack of cultural background of the target language and the failure to achieve the appropriate equivalence in the target language stand as difficulties and obstacles in terms of culture.