The Translation of Medical and Health-Related Idioms by University Students from English into Arabic: Challenges and Strategies

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the challenges faced by undergraduate English language and literature majors when translating colloquial idioms and the strategies they employ to overcome these difficulties. Every so often, the literature documents two main and significant obstacles. Since languages differ in how they express meaning through the use of idioms, frozen and fixed formulations, and other linguistic strategies, there is firstly a lack of equivalence in the target language. Finding equivalents in the target language is therefore quite difficult. Translation may also be difficult because there are idioms that have the same structure in two languages but different meanings (Baker, 1992). The researchers examined the various approaches university students took when translating medical and health-related idioms from English into Arabic to answer the question of which strategies are most commonly used.. Ten distinct medical and health idioms were provided to forty-one Al- Balqa' Applied University (BAU) students to translate, all in context. Baker's model was applied to the data analysis. The results revealed that partial equivalence strategy was used the most by students in the study. They also show that students are familiar with colloquial Arabic idioms and that they understand the English idioms

Keywords: Translation assessment, Medical idioms, Translation strategies, English – Arabic translation, Translation pedagogy.

Highlights

• An investigation of the major challenges undergraduate translation students face
• An exploration of the strategies that undergraduate translation students use to overcome challenges
• How undergraduate translation students engage translational theoretical background in their translation practice
• An illustration of how translation assessment highlights areas for improvement
• Most undergraduate translation students in the study used partial equivalence as a strategy