Strategies in Translating Collocations in Religious Texts from Arabic into English.

Abstract

The present study investigated the strategies adopted by students in translating specific lexical and semantic collocations in three religious texts namely, the Holy Quran, the Hadith and the Bible. For this purpose, the researchers selected a purposive sample of 35 MA translation students enrolled in three different public and private Jordanian universities . The data investigated here consisted of a translation test that comprised 45 relatively short sentences of contextual collocations selected from the above-mentioned three religious texts and divided as 15 collocations per text. Students were required to translate these collocations from Arabic into English. The findings have shown that students resorted to various strategies in order to overcome the problem of rendering certain collocational expressions. Employed strategies were synonymy, generalization, paraphrasing, deletion and literal translation. Moreover, the study indicated that the strategy of synonymy emerged as the most conspicuous one for translating lexical collocations while literal translation signaled the first adopted strategy in the translation of semantic collocations in the Holy Quran and in the Bible. Deletion emerged as the most obvious strategy in translating collocation in the Hadith.

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