Strategies in Translating Collocations in Political Texts: Case study of the Beirut Port Explosion 2020

Abstract

: The present study examines the strategies used by Saudi undergraduate students when translating adjective plus noun collocations and verb plus object collocations in political texts from English into Arabic. An English proficiency test, along with a translation test, were conducted to evaluate the performance of the students. The translation test consisted of 10 English collocations selected from 53 random extracts from two online articles on the BBC and The Guardian websites, focusing on the Beirut port explosions in August 2020. The results show that the literal translation technique was highly dominant in translating both types of classification. This indicates that students encounter some obstacles when it comes to determining the correct equivalents in Arabic. However, the data show that sometimes literal translation can sometimes be adequate in translating the political collocations in both types. The data also reveal that a synonymy strategy was adopted more frequently in translating the verb + object than the noun + adjective. This is mainly because the frequency of (un)restrictedness of collocation errors may be limited in political texts because the structure of political texts is different from that of other texts, in the sense that it has a limited number of culture-specific collocations that are frequently translated, and therefore an equivalent can easily be found in the target language.