Article,
Impact of E-dictionaries on Arab students' translation strategies
Babel: Revue internationale de la traduction/International Journal of Translation, (2008)
Abstract
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.
