Arab Educational Information Network

The purpose of this study is to show through the interference of the native language, Arabic, in the English translation of the Egyptian students. It aims at probing some discrepancies in the Egyptian secondary stage students' proficiency in translation, attributed to lexical and semantic transfer from Arabic to English, reflected through a set of language tasks. The participants are 35 Egyptian secondary stage EFL students; studying English as part of their curriculum, during the second semester of the school year 2015-2016. The study raises the question: What problems arise from the linguistic of Arabic when translating different written texts into English and conversely? To achieve the goal of the study, the researcher analyzed the participants' errors in written translation texts. Since the study is mainly qualitative; some kinds of transfer/interference phenomena that occurred in the collected data were spotted, the possible communicative strategies that the participants employed, consciously or unconsciously, when translating were identified and exemplified and the reasons behind their occurrence were analyzed. Besides, a quantitative analysis was carried out to interpret the results using frequencies and percentages. Results showed that the problems that arise from interference are mainly lexical and semantic, and might be attributed to the participants' lack of knowledge and awareness of the source language as well as the target one. The study concluded that sometimes translations from Arabic into English and vice versa tend to lose original meanings or be misinterpreted compared to the source text because of linguistic transfer. It is suggested that raising awareness of liguistic transfer through focused attention on transfer errors alongside with systematic instruction and practice on translation might be valued by the students and seemed essential for them to achieve productive proficiency. (Published abstract)