What is it about?
This study aimed at helping students to deal systematically and effectively with culture-specific items. This was treated through designing and applying a specific course based on sixteen strategies adopted from what Newmark(1988), Hariyanto (1997), and Harvey (2003) suggested. The course was designed in the light of these strategies. It included different cultural topics with various cultural items in both English and Arabic. The course was applied in seven weeks to a sample of third-year university students at Al-Imam Muhammad Bin Saud Islamic University, College of Languages and Translation, during the first seven weeks of the second term. Students were asked to answer a pre-test on culture-specific items. The same test was distributed on students after the treatment which was represented in teaching the specific course. A Wilcoxon test was used to compare students’ scores in each item and in the test as a whole. The results showed the effectiveness of using the specific course in developing third-year students’ skills in translating culture-specific items. However, the change that happened for students was not very high as only one got an excellent degree and just four got a very good degree. The percentage of unsuccessful students reached 25% and the percentage of students with fair degree reached 40%. This reflected the fact that the time was not enough as students needed more practice. In general, strategy teaching is very important but it is not sufficient to create professional or good translators.
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Why is it important?
The study tried to achieve the following objectives: 1. To investigate the effectiveness of using a specific course in cultural translation for developing students‟ skills to translate culture-specific items. 2. To identify the most effective strategy that helped students overcome their problems in translating culture-specific items. 3. To develop a culture-based translation course. 4. To develop a culture-based translation test. 5. To develop a translation strategy awareness among students.
Perspectives
Results of the study clearly pinpointed that careful planning for the translation classes and systemic training in translation skills could contribute significantly to the improvement of students‟ ability to translate. Moreover, Students' success in performing the translation tasks correctly enhances their ability to translate and creates more favorable attitudes towards translation courses. On the other hand, the present study and the suggested specific course helped in motivating students to improve their translation skills, but they need more than just one specific course. There should be a holistic and interrelated web of language courses that run along the four years of study in order to achieve remarkable and considerable improvements in translation skills. In this study, because of time limitation, the sample was small. So, for the generalization of these findings and for higher reliability of the results more studies are needed. In general, based the research in translating culture-specific items, students should try to use equivalents as much as possible to give optimal translation, and in those cases which there are not any equivalent for them in the target language, they can convey all aspects of their meaning by translating them literally plus adding some note or create equivalent for them based on the target language word formation processes, or they can make new words in the target language by different means either to use the existing material in the target language in other new ways to increase its term formation processes or to import words from another language to enrich its vocabulary.
Dr Montasser Mohamed Abdelwahab Mahmoud
Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University
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This page is a summary of: The Effectiveness of a Suggested Specific Course on Developing Third-year University Students’ Skills in Translating Culture-specific Items, Theory and Practice in Language Studies, August 2013, Academy Publication,
DOI: 10.4304/tpls.3.8.1299-1310.
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