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This study compared and contrasted some syntactic aspects of the sentence in Arabic and English political speeches, namely sentence length, frequency of sentence types, and forms. It also aimed at determining the roles or functions of these features and the ideological goals they serve in the speeches. Twenty political speeches in Arabic and twenty political speeches in English were collected from the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meetings between 2015 and 2019. The analysis revealed that the sentence in the Arabic political speeches is slightly shorter than its counterpart in English. It was also found that the complex sentence is more frequent in the Arabic speeches, while the simple sentence is more frequent in the English speeches. The analysis also revealed that these syntactic features were used to perform several functions in the text to serve ideological goals such as promoting ideas and maintaining political neutrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The differences between English and Arabic metaphors can be confusing and challenging for second language learners and translators. The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast between temperature metaphors pertaining to (hot, warm, cool, cold, ḥa:rr حار, dafiʔ دافئ and ba:rid بارد (in English and Arabic to find similarities and differences between them in terms of functions, frequencies, structures, collocations and the fields they were attested in. The data were collected from dictionaries, corpora, websites, advertisements and daily life conversations. The findings revealed that temperature metaphors in English were more frequently used than they are in Arabic. In addition, the functions used in English temperature metaphors are more and varied. Another finding revealed that Arabic does not have an equivalent to the English word “cool”. Finally, English temperature metaphors are attested in more fields than in Arabic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Idiomatic competence constitutes an essential component of foreign language learners’ communicative competence. Unlike the other types of competences, idiomatic competence has not been accorded adequate attention in second language acquisition research. This study investigates the extent to which Arab learners of English, at the tertiary level, can recognize and use English idioms in culturally appropriate contexts. It is an attempt to provide answers to the following questions: (1) how well can Arab EFL learners recognize idioms in English texts? (2) How well can they produce idioms in their written performance? (3) What type of difficulties may they encounter in recognizing and producing idioms? (4) What are the possible causes of such difficulties? (5) What implications may such a study offer to language teaching and learning, curriculum designers, textbook authors, teaching translation and training translators? A specially designed test consisting of four elicitation tasks was used to evaluate the competence of Arab learners of English in recognizing and using idioms. The subjects of the study were 100 students, including 50 English majors and 50 non-English majors. The analysis of the subjects’ responses revealed that their idiomatic competence is deficient and below expectations at the levels of recognition and production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at investigating the nature and scope of the problems that Arab learners encounter in translating English metaphorical expressions into Arabic using English--Arabic dictionaries. The strategies involved in translating English metaphors into Arabic have been identified and described. The study also aims at determining the extent to which English--Arabic dictionaries are helpful to learners in translating English metaphors. The findings of the study reveal that learners resort to a number of strategies including finding the idiomatic translation equivalents, literal translation, interpretation and guessing. Bilingual dictionaries have been found to be a potential source of error for learners. These dictionaries offer inadequate help to translators in terms of providing equivalents to metaphorical expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the problems that translators and Arab learners of English encounter in translating Arabic sentences containing the Arabic discourse marker 'fa' into English. Several types of texts were surveyed in order to identify the salient functions that this marker has in Arabic discourse. Five major functions were identified: Explanatory, Consequential, Causal, Sequential and Adversative. A translation task was designed to find out how this marker translates into English. The subjects were 50 English-major Arab students studying at the University of Sharjah. The difficulties that Arab learners encounter in translating Arabic 'fa' into English were identified and rank ordered in terms of difficulty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]