Investigating university students difficulties in translating computing terms from English into Arabic

Abstract EN

The present study seeks to investigate university students English language learners’ difficulties in translating scientific terms and to draw attention to the role of adopting the appropriate method that may produce high quality translation using purely Arabic vocabulary.

The data was gathered by means of a research tool in the form of a written translation test.

The analysis of the data confirms that students’ mistakes are due to their ignorance of appropriate methods they to be used to translate scientific terms and to their unfamiliarity with the computer sciences peculiar language.

The result revealed that the difficulties student face, are due to their lack of background knowledge concerning the computing terms, as well as their ignorance to the importance of adopting a method that facilitates the translation process and assures a good translation production., some pedagogical implications have been provided as a starting point towards resolving this problem and helping the students cope with scientific terminology in the process of translation.