A Contrastive Study between English and Arabic Prepositional Phrases Essay

A Contrastive Study between English and Arabic Prepositional Phrases - Essay Example This problem also has pedagogical implications, as a better understanding of the problems faced by students during translation can enable teachers to better address the problem. This study could therefore prove useful in the field of language education, particularly for teaching EFL to Arab students.Ho-Abdullah & Hasan’s (2009) study also examined issues concerning English prepositions when translated into Arabic and vice versa. However, it was concerned solely with the preposition explaining how its translation reflects the use of different conceptual mapping domains. Moreover, this study only involved 75 Iraqi secondary school students, so it was focused on the translation difficulties faced by Arabic speaking students when translating from English into Arabic. In Habash’s (1982) earlier study on the use of English prepositions by Arab students, the errors made in using prepositions were categorised according to their number of occurrences. While this is useful, agai n the focus was on teaching English to Arabic students in order to improve their English. Moreover, the analysis of translations was based on existing and formal written work rather than under experimental conditions.This study attempts to compare and analyze English and Arabic prepositional phrases in terms of their functions, uses, order and meanings. It also attempts to illustrate similarities and differences between English and Arabic prepositional phrases as not every prepositional phrase.... This includes difficulties related to pronunciation (Al-Saidat, 2010), various reading difficulties (Patil, N.d.), and so on. This study will be concerned with difficulties encountered in translating prepositional phrases. The preposition is a key component of the prepositional phrase so the difficulty in translating the latter is often due to difficulty with the preposition itself. The difficulty of translating prepositions from English into Arabic can be illustrated by the contrast between and . Whereas suggests a position, suggests a movement, but in Arabic, would be used in both cases, so Arabs may find it difficult to differentiate between them. The Arabic thus has a much wider domain for its usage, and it can also be used for expressing , , , etc. On the other hand, Arabic prepositions are purely spatiotemporal prepositions whereas English prepositions actually function as either proper prepositions, substantive-derived locative (directional) adverbs, or as particles (Lindstrom berg, 2010, p. 23). Hence, the English concept of a preposition is wider in scope than in Arabic. The nature of the errors tends to be errors of omission, substitution, or redundant usage. Prepositions also pose a problem for machine translations in translating English noun phrase into Arabic (Shaalan et al., 2004) so the problem is not unique to human translation. Also, the problem is by no means peculiar to Arab students. English prepositions are notorious for being problematic for many EFL students. As Pittman (1966 in Mickiewicza, 1993, p. 181) remarked, â€Å"Among those who teach or learn the English language, prepositions have earned a reputation for difficulty if not downright unpredictability†. The main