Open AccessIdentifying the Problems EFL Students Encounter in Translating Adverbs from English into Arabic
Author(s) -
Eman Abdulsalam Al Khalil
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international journal of research in social sciences and humanities(online)/international journal of research in social sciences and humanities
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2454-4671
pISSN - 2249-4642
DOI - 10.37648/ijrssh.v11i03.032
Subject(s) - adverbial , linguistics , meaning (existential) , arabic , set (abstract data type) , grammar , psychology , ambiguity , computer science , philosophy , psychotherapist , programming language
While discussing the grammatical problems EFL learners confront in translating betweenlanguages, especially in translating adverbs as a basic category in English Grammar, it issignificantly highlighting the difficulties these learners encounter and justifying the errorsthey make when translating adverbs and adverbial phrases from English into Arabic.Obviously, the errors are due to the fact that both languages at hand belong to two sharplydistant language families and systems. In other words, language is culture-specific; whatmight be in one, might not be the same in the other, this leads to the ambiguity andmisunderstanding of adverbs real contextual meaning, resulting the displacement of adverbswithin sentences. Besides, Arab learners of English are sufficiently competent of Englishlanguage and culture, thus English adverbs system and adverbial order, and their counterpartsin Arabic which in turn affect their translation into their native. The study, therefore, suggestssome strategies to be employed by Arab learners when translating English adverbs intoArabic.However, it is hypothesized that EFL students at the undergraduate level have confusion inunderstanding the adverbs contextual meaning or in other words their sentential meaning, thuserr when translating these adverbs from English into Arabic. To prove the hypotheses of thestudy, two tests, of five sentences each, are set for fifty randomly chosen students at theundergraduate level to do; the first test is set to re-place the adverbs properly withinsentences; whereas the second is set to translate English adverbs into Arabic contextually.Then the data of the study are analyzed and the results of the tests are evaluated to show howsentence meaning is affected by the misplacement and mistranslation of adverbs and adverbialphrases. In addition, to prove that the deficiencies in translation are due to the dissimilaritiesbetween English and Arabic adverbs meaning and order, and Arabic learner