Evaluating the Translation of Accusative of Purpose by EFL learners

Abstract

Arabic is the most widely spoken Semitic language and has seen phases of change from the Quranic form to the more popular Modern Standard Arabic that is used for communication today. Teachers of language and translation in KSA are concerned with learning problems that arise due to lexical and grammatical non-equivalence between Arabic and English which often leads to confusion and incorrect output during translation process. The current study aimed at investigating one of the Arabic grammatical structures which has no direct equivalent in English (Accusative of Purpose). It is an original noun derived from a verb of affectivity, explaining the reason why the action of the previous verb has been done. Two objectives were targeted: One, testing the learners’ ability to translate the Accusative of Purpose; and two, to gather an understanding of the strategies they adopted in the process. The study is likely to be of great value in a foreign language learning environment as is the case in the KSA. We used written tests to collect the data, followed by detailed interviews to elicit information on the translation strategies used. Participants were female undergraduate students (N=35) at Hurimilla College of Science and Humanities, Shaqra University, KSA, of which fifteen were randomly interviewed consequently. Both qualitative and quantative approaches were used. The data collected was analysed using SPSSR.  The results revealed that (36.0%) of the students’ translations were correct or acceptable, while 34.3% were literal, and (15.4%) were incorrect. Personal interviews revealed that reasons of these results can be attributed to the absence of this category in English, and non-equivalence between Arabic and English. Based on these findings, the present study suggests more investigations on similar Arabic structures which have no correspondence in English using larger number of participants.