Difficulties and Strategies of Translating Collocation

Abstract

The aim of this study is to have some insights into the translation students' proficiency in translating collocations and the different difficulties they face when they translate them. So, a test of 20 English collocations is given to the 4th year students of English and translation Department in the UST to translate them into Arabic. They are allowed to use offline dictionaries. Then the students’ translations are corrected from the point of view of being acceptable or unacceptable, and the students’ performance is evaluated. Also, this study sheds light on the strategies applied by the students in rendering the 20 collocations into Arabic. Moreover, the difficulties the students face in the translation process of these collocations are identified depending on a questionnaire of nine areas of difficulties given to them. Based on the correction and analysis of the students’ translations and the students’ responses to the questionnaire, it is found that the performance of 55% of the students is unsatisfied. In addition, the overall performance of the whole students is fair. The most frequently used strategy is literal strategy, and the most common area of difficulty the majority of students with percentage of 75% strongly agree on is the lack of special dictionaries of English-Arabic collocations.