Investigating difficulties encountered by Iraqi's EFL learners in textual translation

Abstract EN

This study aims at investigating the causes behind the poor level in textual translation that students of English department encounter, and determining college students’ attitudes in Arabic and English translation.

It is hypothesized that students of English department have different attitudes concerning the causes of the poor level in textual translation.

Teaching method used in textual translation is the main reason behind the poor level in students' ability in textual translation.

This study is limited to textual translation taught to students fourth year English department College of Education for Women University of Tikrit for the academic year 2016-2017 .

In order to verify the hypotheses of the present study a questionnaire is constructed for EFL learners to show their points of view about the causes of poor textual translation.

Then a sample of twenty five college students has been chosen .

After administrating the questionnaire to the selected sample and analyzing data collected , the study reveals that the main reason behind students weakness is the method used in teaching translation and the time devoted for translation activities .

Also, more attention is needed for translation teaching in general and textual translation in particular because most of the students believe that it reflects the culture of the target language more than other types of translation such as free and literary translation.