Publications

Publication details [#47773]

Al-Jabr, Abdul-Fattah. 2008. Impact of E-dictionaries on Arab students’ translation strategies. Babel 2 : 110–124.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/babel

Annotation

This paper sets out to investigate the impact of e-dictionaries on Arab students’ translation skills and strategies. To this effect, expressions or sentences including culture-specific, idiomatic, collocational, and colloquial expressions as well as syntactic complex structures were given to some Arab translation students at Bahrain University. The results showed a considerable effect of e-dictionaries on the strategies the students employed in rendering the given texts. It was found that e-dictionaries very often opt for word-for-word translation and formal (literal) equivalence in search for meanings of lexical elements. More complex structure was found to pose greater challenge to both e-dictionaries and students. On the other hand, familiarity with lexical elements made the translation task much easier. The paper concludes with a summary of the problems both e-dictionaries and Arab students normally encounter when attempting problematic issues from English into Arabic.