Translation as a Teaching Tool in EFL Classes at the University Level

The current research aims at studying students’ attitudes towards the instructors’ use oftranslation in EFL classes at university level. It hypothesizes that students have a positiveattitude towards instructors’ use of such a means. The research is limited to a sample of47 male and female 2nd year students at the department of English language, college ofLanguages, Nawroz University during the academic year 2020-2021. To study thesample’s attitudes, a questionnaire that subsumes (20) relevant items has been designedand administered to the sample of students. The results show that students have positiveattitudes towards their instructors use of translation in English as a Foreign language (EFL)classes at university level. In the light of such results, some recommendations have beenput forward.

Realization of Speech Act of Permission by Kurdish EFL University Students

This study aims to examine Kurdish EFL university students’ development of L2 pragmatic competence by investigating their performance of the speech acts of permission. The methodology of this study was a combined research method, which comprises a quantitative and a qualitative method (mixed method). Total of 97 participants were involved in this research study. 83 (33 males and 50 females) were from four state universities and one private university in the Iraqi Kurdistan region and 14 were native speakers of English. A discourse completion test (DCT) was used to elicit the required data from participants. The study used convenience sampling for the participants because both native and non-native participants were selected on the basis of their availability. The data were coded and analysed quantitatively in terms of overall strategy use and strategy patterns. The findings revealed that there were differences in the frequency and percentages of strategies and semantic formulae in performing the speech act. KEFLUS tended to use more direct and explicit. There were more politeness and implicitness in NSE' behaviours in performing the speech act, which might have resulted from the lack of pragmatic competence of KEFLUS.

Lexical and Structural Ambiguity in Machine Translation: An Analytical Study

The aim of this study is to investigate the difficulties facing Machine Translation (Google) particularly those related to lexis and structure. The researcher has chosen randomly two English and two Arabic texts about various sorts of translation: Media, Scientific, General and Economic. They were taken from several sources (websites, magazine.) to be translated automatically (Google) and humanly from Arabic to English and vice versa. Then they were analyzed to see the challenges that face Machine Translation (Google). The results of the study indicate that MT is problematic and has many challenges concerning lexis such as (Deletions, non-vocalizations, multiple meanings, collocations, additions and acronyms) and syntax like: word order, verb-subject agreement, passive voice etc. On the basis of the results of the study, the researcher recommended that further work needs to be done to create a system that comprises syntax, morphology and semantics of all languages.