Investigating the Relationship between Vocabulary Size and Cultural Competence in English-Arabic Translation

The translation of culture-bound expressions can be a challenge even for professional translators. This paper, therefore, explores the possibility of predicting the level of cultural competence needed in order to avoid translation errors by correlating cultural translation competence to vocabulary size. The results of our survey of Arabic professional translators show that vocabulary size was lower than expected, but vocabulary size can be an indicator of acceptable translation of culture-bound expressions, which we refer to as culture-bound items (CBIs). However, vocabulary size cannot always be used as an indicator of high quality translation. Overall, our results highlight the need for further cultural training for translators.