Impact of E-dictionaries on Arab students’ translation strategies

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.