Some Problems in Translating English Collocations into Arabic

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the problems of rendering English collocations into Arabic among the Libyan students. Fourteen students of the seven semester in English department are to be examined in this experiment during the academic semester Fall 2020. All the students are learning English as a foreign language and they are native Arabic speakers. The data procedure was a test of fourteen widespread English collocations. We asked the students to translate them in one hour. The result showed that the participants were not competent in understanding and translating English collocations into Arabic. Also, our aim is to have some insights about the students' awareness of collocations and the different problems which the students may face when translating various types of collocations. We will try to test and evaluate their awareness by examining their translation of English collocations into Arabic, and vice versa. The results of this research reveal two main causes of students' errors in translating collocations. First, students adopt literal translation as the main method. Second, students do not give enough importance to collocations which belong to another culture and language. The main conclusion is that collocations are both a linguistic and a cultural issue and are not just a matter of substituting words by their equivalent in another language.