Challenges and Strategies of Translating COVID-19 Adjective-Noun and Noun-Noun Collocations from English into Arabic

Abstract

Collocations are used extensively in the English language, but their rendition into Arabic may prove problematic for translators. Difficulties in translating collocations can be exacerbated by their novelty and the speed with which they enter the lexicon. The unprecedented increase in research on the current pandemic has been due to a big public demand for COVID-19 related information, and equally bigger demand for translating that information into a language that the public can understand. The translation of COVID-19 collocations into Arabic can be challenging for the trainee translators who are inundated with new terms and phrases. The present study aimed to investigate the difficulties and procedures trainee translators used while rendering the lexical COVID-19 collocations from English into Arabic. A sample of 72 bachelor students at two Jordanian universities was asked to translate 15 English COVID-19 collocations within contextual sentences into Arabic. The selected collocations were chosen from the WHO website. The findings show that the participants faced several translation difficulties due to cultural and linguistic disparities between English and Arabic as well as the participants' insufficient knowledge about the novel virus. Data analysis indicates that participants used several translation techniques, such as equivalence, literal translation, reduction, synonymy, paraphrase, transposition, and couplet. The study concludes that translator training programs need to pay closer attention to trainees’ extra-linguistic skills with specific focus on cultural awareness.