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

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/to يعتذر 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 for ينتظر ); (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 proposal عرض عليه اقتراح, stopped participating توقف عن المشاركة, lack somethingيفتقر 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.

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