Investigating Student's Cultural Problems In Translating English Idioms Into Arabic

Résumé: The present study is a linguistic investigation of cultural difficulties in translation. It deals with the difficulties of finding the appropriate equivalent when translating english idioms into arabic. The aim of this study is to examine the cultural problems, that third year students at Larbi Ben M'Hidi university Oum-El-Bouaghi face while translating english idioms. And tries to suggest solutions and identify strategies that may help to minimize these difficulties. In this respect, a test made up of twenty english idioms is given to third year students to be translated. The results of the study show that in addition to some semantic problems where students can not recognize the meaning of the constituent words of the idiom, the main difficulty lies in identifying the cultural context or background of the target language idiom in the process of translating idioms from english into arabic. Furthermore, the findings show that knowing the origin or being aware of the variation of the context of use helps a lot of students of english to guess the suitable meaning of idioms. They also reveal that, literal translation is the most used strategy among students whereas the application of other translation strategies is limited, the thing that leads to the emergence of difficulties of translation, in addition to the inability of students to find the appropriate equivalent because of their poor repertoire.

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