The impact of linguistic and cultural competence on translation quality: Pedagogical insights into translation problems

Abstract

The act of translation inside classroom undertakes a great deal of students’ mistakes either grammatical or lexical (i.e. metaphoric, idiomatic, collocational) and some feedback as well. Many studies have concentrated on studying the reasons behind committing such mistakes on the level of undergraduates. However, this paper will start with shedding light on some samples of students’ mistakes to reach instructor-perspective proposed solutions at the end. The study aims at assisting both instructors and institutions of translation to apply pedagogical solutions to their students or translation courses. Moreover, the study further attempts to explore the impact of students’ cultural and linguistic competence on the quality of translation. Researchers adopted a selective analytical method, mainly quantitative, in studying students’ mistakes in the course of Translation 2 in the 1st semester during the academic year 2019-2020 at the English Department-Female Division-Faculty of Languages and Translation-King Khalid University, and then proposed solutions. The language pair discussed here is Arabic-English-Arabic.