Successful Translation Students’ Use of Dictionaries

Dictionaries of all types are an indispensable tool for both professional and trainee translators. However, the literature on trainee translators indicates that the skills associated with dictionary use have not been given the required attention. Knowing which dictionaries to use and how to use them efficiently when engaged in the translation process are significant aspects of translation pedagogy. In fact, facilitating the development of effective dictionary use helps develop translation competence in general. Therefore, the present article reports on a qualitative case study of successful translation students’ usage of and preferences for various types of dictionaries. The results show that successful trainee translators use dictionaries to locate synonyms or better translations for target words. Successful translation students are also reported to use dictionaries frequently to check spelling. Most respondents reported consulting the dictionary after they finished reading source texts. In line with the global move toward digitalization, the participants reported using electronic dictionaries with significantly greater frequency than paper dictionaries. In most cases, successful translation students’ use of paper dictionaries was limited to classroom examinations. The open-ended interview questions also helped to reveal the variety of dictionaries used by this group of trainee translators. Taken together, these findings have utility for translation instructors, particularly regarding the improvement of trainee translators’ experiences and the provision of assistance to less successful students.

Situation-Specific Speaking Anxiety: University-Level Students’ Experiences

Second language (L2) learners are very keen to master speaking in their L2, and this is among the most important of all language skills. However, speaking anxiety is a major obstacle to successful L2 learning. This study was designed to investigate university-level students’ attitudes towards speaking in English and their experience of anxiety. 81 participants who majored in English with an average age of 21.8 years were recruited. The researcher conducted semi-structured interviews and administered a four-point Likert-scale questionnaire with 18 items, designed to address three constructs: a) fear of speaking in English; b) fear of making mistakes in English; and c) fear of being judged by others. The findings showed that although the participants were generally unconcerned about speaking English, their attitudes were different when they were asked about specific situations. When asked about their fear of making mistakes in front of their classmates, or of being judged by them, they agreed that in those circumstances they would experience anxiety.

Foreign Language Anxiety: Translating and Validating a Scale

The purpose of this study was to validate one of the most frequently used tools for assessing anxiety associated with foreign languages. The researcher translated it into Arabic because there was no Arabic literature on such an instrument. To achieve the goal, a committee approach was followed (Brislin, 1980) to ensure the validity of the translation. A sample of 102 students was purposefully selected from International Islamic University Malaysia. The instrument consists of 33 items to measure communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was run to validate the instrument; initially, the PCA produced ten-factor solutions, accounting for 71% of the total variance explained. However, the last nine factors had only two or three loadings each, and they had cross-loading as well. Therefore, only one factor was used in the final, which accounted for 51% of the total variance. The researcher took this factor due to its importance for the Arabic literature, which is also in need of a valid instrument to measure communication apprehension. Due to the lack of convergent validity in the other items, the researcher suggests validating the original instrument.

Analysing Linguistic Stylistic Devices in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and So Long a Letter: A Comparative Appraisal

This research work focuses on linguistic stylistic analysis of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. It aims to identify the various translation procedures used in each novel in order to establish a comparison between the different translation procedures and style of each translator of modern and old English. A sampling method has been used to carry out this research work. Thus, one extract has been selected with its corresponding translation from the French and English versions of each novel. The results show that, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the translator has used predominantly adaptation for his translation representing 32.32% in both selected extracts whereas in So Long a Letter, the translator has adopted predominantly literal translation representing a proportion of 28.48% in order to preserve the sustained register of the source text. However, both translators have also used other translation procedures in lower proportions depending on the context orientation. It has been noted that translation methods such as calque has been used only once whereas borrowing is nonexistent in the selected extracts from both literary works.

Pitch Accent Distribution and Focus Structure in Taifi Arabic: A Production Study

Prosodic encoding of focus in Taifi Arabic is not yet fully understood. A recent production study found significant acoustic differences between syntactically identical sentences with information focus, contrastive focus and without focus. This paper presents results from a production experiment investigating whether information and contrastive focus have prosodic effects on the pitch-accent distributions. Using question-answer paradigms, 16 native speakers of Taifi Arabic were asked to read three target sentences in different focus conditions. Results reveal that every content word is pitch-accented in utterances with and without focus. However, there are very few cases (23.12%) in which the post-focus words are deaccented. The largest percentage of deaccentuation was observed in the utterances with initial contrastive focus. The results show that focus structures in Taifi Arabic show both deaccentuation and post-focus compression. Therefore, the prosodic realization of focus in Taifi Arabic is different from their counterparts in other Arabic dialects such as Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic. These findings have an important implication for both the prosodic typology and focus typology.

Raising Students’ Cultural Awareness and Developing Their Intercultural Communicative Competence: The Case of the Greek State Primary School EFL Textbooks

The present study focuses on the critical evaluation of the cultural content incorporated in the 5th and 6th grade English textbooks, which are taught in the Greek state primary school. Given that we are living in the era of increasing globalization, it is deemed essential that aspects of diverse cultures should be reflected in the English textbooks, thus enabling contemporary EFL learners to master the ability to use the English language efficiently in their intercultural interactions regardless of their socio-cultural background. The research findings succinctly reveal that the vast majority of state EFL teachers in Greece are fervent proponents of an intercultural approach in their teaching practices. However, they are not reliant on the prescribed textbooks under scrutiny for promoting the intercultural dimension in their educational methodology, since their cultural input is assessed as deficient and inadequate for dynamic intercultural instruction.

Profanity and Play: Solidarity in the Discourse of Cyberbullying

Offering the world countless remarkable benefits, computer mediated communication has become an essential feature of modern life. However, it has also become a medium for personal aggression and abuse of diverse kinds. The discourse of online vilification has been the topic of much research, for instance on the behaviour of trolls. This study focuses on a little researched phenomenon, the discourse of cyberbullying, in particular a subtype, cybermobbing, in which a group of participants gather online to attack an individual over a period of time. The study takes up an example of such participants who joined a Facebook group dedicated to abusing a prominent sportsman. The purpose of the study is to identify the chief discourse characteristics of cybermobbing that bind the participants together. The analysis reveals a high degree of solidarity among the participants expressed through profanity, humour, and play. The results will also throw light on the mentality of those who engage in cybermobbing.

Morphological Characteristics of English Football Language

Football is the most popular sport globally. It is considerably modern sport, nevertheless, attracted millions zealous followers. Several media outlets cover activities and events of football world-wide around the clock. The researcher has been attracted and encouraged by follow-up and study of hundreds of native English football texts on specialized sports and football media outlets as newspapers, magazines, T.V and radio programs as well as electronic sites. At the end of the study, the researcher has analyzed these texts linguistically and then classified them according to their morphological categorizations. Football morphological elements surfaced by the researcher include affixation, compounding, clipping, eponymy, and loans (borrowings). At the end of the study, the researcher has provided some related results and recommendations.

“His Favorite Things Mahi Al-hadia” Social Functions of Code Switching in Bilingual Children’s Conversations

This study explored the occurrence of code switching among six Arabic-English Saudi bilingual children living in the United States at the time of the study. A Qualitative research design, using three research instruments namely, parental questionnaire, language portraits, and recorded storytelling sessions, was conducted in order to investigate the social functions of code switching. The study adopted Myers-Scotton’s (1993) Markedness Model to examine better the social motivation behind code switching in children’s conversations. Overall, the findings revealed the participant’s dominant and preferred language to be English, and the switch to English was frequent to serve certain functions, such as to change the addressee, engage in interaction, make alignment, ask for translation, expand, invoke authority, and finish the conversation. Moreover, this study contributes to the current research on the Markedness Model among bilingual children by providing evidence for Myers-Scotton (1993) as marked and unmarked code switching was observed among the Arabic-English bilingual children. This study also agrees with previous studies (e.g., Bolonyai, 2005; Fuller, Elsman, & Self, 2007; Myers-Scotton, 2002) that argued that bilingual children are rational and social actors who choose a given code intentionally to achieve certain social goals in a given interaction.

Word Stress in Qassimi Arabic: A Constraint-Based Analysis

This study aimed to produce a formalism of word stress in Qassimi Arabic (QA), which is a sub-dialect of Najdi Arabic (NA), using a constraint-based approach. To this end, this paper investigated two main topics: The first topic explored word stress in QA. Word stress in QA, as well as in NA, is predictable; it can be determined by syllable weight and position. However, two cases do not conform to such straightforward stress rules. These cases are represented by the words: [ʔal.ʕa.sˤir] ‘afternoon’ and [ʔa.ʕa.rif] ‘I know’. Derivational analysis of these exceptions shows the importance of relating the surface structures of such forms to their underlying representations. The second topic aimed to make a formalism for stress patterns in QA using optimality theory (OT). Thus, QA word stress rules and their exceptions are translated into conflicting constraints that are ranked relative to one another by the use of constraint-relation tableaux. This ranking eventually produced the following constraint-relation hierarchy: Lx≈Pr, SYLLABLE-INTEGRITY, TROCHAIC, FAITH-PK >> NONFINAL >> *[ʔa. >> FTBIN-µ, WSP, ALL-FEET-RIGHT >> MAIN-RIGHT, PARSE-σ.