The impact of cultural context on translating idioms and collocations

Abstract

The present study sheds lights on one of the translation problems which arise from translating remotely unrelated languages, such as Arabic and English; it is the impact of cultural context on translating idioms and collocations from English into Arabic and vice versa. No one can deny the role that culture plays in increasing the difficulty of translating idioms and collocations and this study is intended to explore such difficulties. This study attempts to investigate the ability of students of translation to translate idioms and collocations from English into Arabic and vice versa. It discusses the errors they commit and the strategies adopted for this process. In addition, it is mainly dealing with problems of translating idioms and collocations, presenting several procedures that can be used to deal with such cultural-bound expressions. This present work probes into research the impact of culture on translating idioms and collocations. It tends to explore cultural hindrances that encounter the students of translation at King Fahd School of Translation and students of Department of Translation at the Faculty of Languages at Sana'a University. It discusses the errors they commit, the problems they face and the proper solutions to deal with. This study also examines the ability of students of translation to translate idioms and collocations from English into Arabic and vice versa. Moreover, it is an attempt to explore the problems students face and considers the various translation strategies used to deal with such problems. The present study also discusses the errors committed by students and the factors behind as well as the suitable solutions to avoid such errors. The framework of this thesis comprises a general introduction and five chapters as follows: A general introduction contains study's aims, formulation of hypothesis and questions, the methodology, statement of the problem, limitations, significance,

definitions of terms, the layout of the study and a background of the translation, culture, idioms, and collocations in previous studies. Chapter One: includes a general overview of language, translation, and culture with a review of translation methods, strategies, procedures and problems. It illustrates the cultural problems and cultural categories. Chapter Two: Comprehensively reviews the relevant literature of the idioms and collocations with their peculiarities, presentation, identification, their importance in translation and their classifications in English and Arabic. Chapter Three: Presents the methodology utilized to conduct the experimental research and elaborates the issues of research instrument design, sample, data collection, data analysis and arguing informants' translation. Chapter Four: Includes a general overview of the results of the questionnaire conducted and investigates the problems especially the cultural problems which students faced when translating idioms and collocations to suggest the useful strategies can be used to solve these problems. It discusses the errors committed by students surveyed and elaborates how to avoid them. Chapter Five: Discusses the informants' translations according to research questions, summarizes the findings of the study and presents suggestions and recommendations. It also draws on suggested directions for further research. This study ends with a general conclusion with an overview main points of the study followed by a list of bibliography and appendixes. The main aim of this study is to explore the difficulties that students of translation face when translating idioms and collocations especially that of cultural context from English into Arabic and vice versa. The other objective is to propose a number of recommendations for students and teachers of translation based on a

range of findings resulted from the empirical research conducted in this study. It helps in revealing students' errors and problems in translating idioms and collocations, so the teachers can set up practical and innovated action steps to develop the students' practice so as to maintain high-quality outcomes. This study is trying to achieve the following purposes: 1. To explore the notion of translation, language and culture and the relationship between them. It also, discusses translation problems especially that related to culture, as well as the translation procedures and strategies used to deal with these problems. 2. To explore the notion, characteristics, types of idioms and collocations in both English and Arabic languages. 3. To shed light on the differences between idioms and collocations in both languages in the framework of linguistic contrastive analysis. 4. To investigate the difficulties of translating idioms and collocations by exploring the translation errors and pitfalls made by students of translation. Such an investigation will be conducted on the empirical data collected from the informants by the means of a questionnaire. 5. To discuss the procedures and strategies used to translate idioms and collocations in general and culturally-bound in particular. 6. To suggest a number of practical and constructive recommendations, as well as, further research suggestions. This study investigates students of translations' ability on translating idioms and collocations, as well as, evaluates their performance and analyzes students' request strategies. The importance of this research is shows in providing the students with a deep insight into translating idioms and collocations especially cultural ones by examining and analyzing their translations. Then attempts have been made to understand the reasons behind such errors in order to avoid them

later on. It provides the students with practical motivating guidelines for Translating idioms and collocations, so as to help them avoid translation errors, and prepare them to get ready for encountering such expressions in their work fields in the future. This study is one of the few studies that tackle the question of translating idioms and collocations from English into Arabic and vice versa especially that of cultural context among students of translation majors. It could also be one of the few translation studies that investigate the relationship between translation and culture in case of idioms and collocations and discuss the cultural difficulties when translating such expressions. This research is an attempt to draw the attention to the necessity of improving the process of translating idioms and collocations to prepare professional translators. It presents some suggestions and recommendations hoping that will be a humble contribution to this field of research and help to improve teaching translation in the schools of translation and universities. It covers all the aspects related to translating idioms and collocations from English into Arabic and vice versa with special attention to cultural problems that students of translation face when translating them. This study considers the first of its kind to examine empirically the actual process of rendering idioms and collocations particularly cultural-specific ones from English into Arabic and vice versa. In this study, we followed in this study the analytical descriptive method and both qualitative and quantitative methodologies i.e. statistical and analytical. In the qualitative data collection, a questionnaire was conducted on a group of 140 students. To achieve the reliability, a questionnaire administered to five students

they shared the same characteristics of the samples. They filled it and we discussed the questionnaire with them. Then, we distributed the questionnaire which - in its final form - was consisted of two parts. The first part included 15 English idioms and 15 English collocations were given to the students for translating them into Arabic. In the same manner, the second part, included 15 Arabic idioms and 15 Arabic collocations were given to the same sample of students for translating them into English. The questionnaires were administered to the sample so distributed and then collected or sent and received by E-mail. The questionnaire distributed in Morocco and Yemen. In Morocco to the M.A first year and second year students of translation at King Fahd High School for Translation, Tangier in the second semester of the academic year 2014/2015 and the first year students in the first semester of the academic year 2015/2016. In Yemen to the B.A fourth-year students at the Department of Translation, Faculty of Languages, Sana'a University during the second semester of the academic year 2014/2015. The sample students belong to the same field of study and they share the same characteristics and interest in translation. The total informants were 150 but ten of them were later removed because their answers were uncompleted (10% of the listed idioms and collocations or less). Thus, the final outcomes were 140 informants included 70 Moroccan students and 70 Yemeni students. The results revealed the students' poor performance on translating idioms and collocations in general and culturally-bound expressions in particular. The results also revealed that students are unaware of the phenomenon of idioms and collocations so they failed in translating them correctly and most of them paraphrased the items or used a literal translation. The required translation is to render the core meaning of each SL item by its direct equivalent without taking into consideration the numbers of words containing the idioms and collocations.

Students are recommended to improve their competence and the teachers can raise students' awareness by introducing courses and training on translating idioms and collocations, as well as the cultural-bound expressions. Results also revealed that the students face more difficulties in translating Arabic idioms and collocations into English where the correct translation scored an average of (29.2%). Low rate of Arabic idioms answered correctly into English which scored an average of (26.1%) revealed unsatisfactory performance of students due to their unfamiliarity with idioms and collocations structure, characteristics, functions and cultural implications even in their mother tongue language. The results showed the weak performance competence of the students and their lack awareness of translation strategies and procedures which used in translating such expressions. Moreover, translating idioms and collocations from Arabic into English is more difficult than translating from English into Arabic. The result showed student's insufficient knowledge in rendering the idioms and collocations due to the errors they committed. The analysis included the problems of the translating idioms and collocations from all points of view and the cultural problems in particular and suggested the best solutions to produce correct equivalent translations. In addition, some idioms and collocations are easy for informants to recognize and deal with by producing the equivalence, while others are very difficult to the extent that some students failed in translating them or left them without any translation. The obtained results of the questionnaire also revealed the practical strategies adopted by students when dealing with idioms and collocations. Paraphrasing, literal translation, finding equivalents in TL and the combination of strategies are the ones used by students of translation.

Paraphrase was the most strategy used by students of translation followed by literal translation and translation by equivalent. The use of an equivalent strategy is the most useful strategy that can be used when translating idioms and collocations. A combination of strategies was used by students of translation to convey the sense and effect of idioms and collocations. Generally speaking, there is no one strategy to be the best for rendering all idioms and collocations because the context and other related factors determine which strategy the students should adopt in translating every idiom and collocation. It require the application of specific translation techniques to convey the meanings and effects of the SL expressions into the TL. It is important to be aware of the differences between the Arabic and English linguistic systems. Translation is a useful means of making an alien culture accessible to the target readers. It is as an act of cultural information so students of translation are advised to be bicultural rather than bilingual and do not translate only words and sentence. Also, they must acquire the process of changing the SL culture into the TL culture and at the same time making SL culture familiar to the TL readers. Culture is one aspect of the language so translation will not exist if culture is untranslatable, and the works would not have been translated. Cultural untranslatability is another problematic issue arise when the SL idiom or collocation is completely absent in the culture of TL. This study discussed this argument of cultural untranslatability which means the impossibility of translating culture and finding the exact equivalent idiom or collocation in the TL. The characteristics of idioms and collocations differ between English and Arabic so equivalent translation becomes problematic and difficult for students of translation. The study also illustrated that students of translation committed errors when translating idioms and collocations implied in literal translation and

misunderstanding of items which lead to mistranslating. Reducing the sense and effect of idioms and collocations is another error students have to avoid. They have to avoid using dialect language in translation. Also, they should take more attention to utilize the standard Arabic instead of produced informal colloquial Arabic expressions or regional dialects as an Arabic equivalent. In sum, the students of translation have shown a weakness in translating idioms and collocations. This weakness proven by the students’ inability to translate idioms and collocations especially that cultural ones and a weak performance appeared in their translations for idioms and collocations listed in the questionnaire. The study revealed that the specialized dictionaries of idioms and collocations neglected especially in the bilingual specialized dictionaries in Arabic. In addition, teachers are advised to teach idioms and collocations in an explicit way with many examples highlighting the similarities and differences between English and Arabic. They can explicit training on positive translation strategies with practices focusing on the translation of idioms and collocations in general and culturally-bound expressions in particular. The equivalence translation in the level of idioms and collocations is the main task for the informants of this study to convey the messages between different cultures. The variety of strategies used in translating idioms and collocations to get the correct translation confirmed that there is no one single strategy that can be used. Some students failed in using the correct strategy when translating idioms and collocations. Others used a literal translation strategy which resulted wrong translation in most cases. The present study has certain basics applications. First, it enlarges the scope of our thinking about the translation process of idioms and collocations. By

studying the problems encountered by students and the strategies they used. Second, the study gives detailed descriptions of idioms and collocations including their definitions, characteristics, types and their importance in language and translation. Third, it broadens the purview of empirical research on translating culture-bound expressions. Fourth, we realized that the process of translating idioms and collocations in general and cultural-bound in particular poses a real difficulty to students of translation which reveals by their poor performance competence. Information included in this study can constitute a base from which the teachers of translation may use to explain the idioms and collocations and try to ease the process of translating such idiomatic expressions. By elaborating the afore-mentioned issues to students and discussing the problems they faced to achieve the correct translations. The role of culture in translation is marginalized in the previous research especially in the Arab world. This means that more studies are needed in the area of culture and translation. This study recommended for other studies related to other issues in translating idioms and collocations or searching on other kinds of expressions such as metaphors and proverbs. It also recommended that more studies in cultural translation are needed due to the lack for such studies especially in Arabic institutions. The discussion of the students' performance in the translation questionnaire has revealed inadequate knowledge of some major aspects of the source and target cultures and lack of awareness of the semantic problems. Inadequate knowledge of the differences between the SL and TL in the realization of culture-specific idioms and collocations. Also, improper utilization of specialized dictionaries while translating to understand the meaning of the idiom or collocation.

In the light of the findings of the present study, it would be appropriate to say that the translation programs should be set in such a manner that reflects the relative importance of cultural issues and concentrate on culture in translation to develop the students' cultural competence in translation. The proposed program also should focus on providing sufficient knowledge of the various aspects of language specially idioms and collocations and raise their awareness of the differences that exist between cultures. Greater attention should be accorded to the adequate presentation of the translation procedures that are used in the translation of culture-bound idioms and collocations from English into Arabic and vice versa. Moreover, the students should be given sufficient practice in identifying those translation procedures in a variety of selected texts that deal with cultural issues. The informants' performance was unsatisfactory in this aspect of cultural competence in translation. Although the informants were allowed to use dictionaries and any other reference works, as well as to search the Internet while answering the questionnaire, and despite the fact that no time limit was set, their overall performance and translation competence was not at the level. A number of factors have led the informants to provide wrong translations for the idioms and collocations listed in the questionnaire. These include the informants' rather poor knowledge of the SL culture-specific terms, their lack of awareness of the differences between the source and target cultures, inadequate proficiency in English and Arabic, improper use of dictionaries, and the failure to recognize the significance of the translation and the importance of idioms and collocations.