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The present study examines the role of context in understanding colloquial Arabic idiomatic expressions by Jordanian good and poor comprehenders in two age groups: 10- and 12-year-olds. Children read short stories comprising Arabic expressions that could be interpreted as idiomatic or not; depending on the context in which they are presented. Familiar and unfamiliar idiomatic expressions were used in this study. The effect of four variables: age, reading comprehension level, meaning condition as well as familiarity with the idiomatic expressions on children’s understanding of idiomatic expressions was examined. Three variables were found to have a main effect on the number of correct answers given by children, these are: meaning condition, reading comprehension level, and familiarity of the idiom. Children gave more correct answers in the transparent meaning condition. More correct answers were given for familiar idiomatic expressions. Also, good comprehenders gave more correct answers than their poor counterparts. On the basis of age, the differences between the groups were not significant.

The Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, is a master of weaving various intellectual sources and different types of religious, artistic, historical, and mythical figures into his poetry. Like any exceptional piece of art, his poetry triggers an immediate response. It blends the aesthetic with the informative to create a vivid world deeply rooted in global heritage and local folklore. This paper investigates the translation strategies of mythical intertextuality in Darwish's poem "Mural." The current paper is a product-oriented descriptive translation study that uses a contrastive analysis of three published translations to analyse the translation strategies. The mythical intertextuality is located in the source text then each example is mapped to its counterparts in the target texts. This study aims to identify the strategies used in translating the Arabic mythical intertextuality into English, find the impediments hindering the translation process, and reach a generalisation about the translators' norms and patterns of translation. The study concludes that regardless of the strategy applied to translate mythical intertextuality, what truly affects the process and product of translation is the translator's cultural accumulative knowledge, i.e. the translator's cultural infrastructure. This knowledge, which enables the translator to perform his vital role as an informed reader, facilitates the task of rendering the mythical intertextuality, which can be studied as a representative of all types of intertextuality, with all its cultural aspects, connections and background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]