ENGLISHARABICANDARABICENGLISHINTERPRETING SKILLS:SAMEORDIFFERENT?

DrReimaAlJarf
KingSaudiUnviersity Introduction Thepurposeofthepresentstudywastoanswerthefollowingquestions: Isthereasignificantdifferencebetweenthestudentsskillsininterpretingdialogs fromEnglishintoArabicandArabicintoEnglish;andtofindoutwhichwaseasier? Isthereanysignificantdifferencebetweenbeginningandadvancedstudents' interpretingskillsingeneralandEnglishArabicandArabicEnglishinterpreting skillsinparticular? AreEnglishArabicandArabicEnglishinterpretingskillsatthebeginningand advancedlevelsrelated? Subjects Subjects of the present study consisted of two samples of students majoring in translation at the College of Languages and translation, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The rst sample is the beginner group which consisted of 95 students in their fifth semester in the translation program. All the students were nativespeaking of Arabic.Theywerealltakingtheirfirstliaisoninterpretingcoursewhichtheauthortaught. Thebeginnergroupneverhadanytranslationorinterpretingtrainingbefore.Theyhadall completedfourlevelsoflistening,speaking,readingandwritingcoursesandtwolevelsof grammarandvocabularybuildingcourses.Theywereconcurrentlytakingthefirstlevelof theconsecutiveandsimultaneousinterpretingcourses. Thesecondsampleistheadvancedgroupwhichconsistedof105studentsintheir

ninth semester in the translation program. All the subjects were native speakers of Arabic. They were taking their second liaison interpreting course that the author taught. In addi on to the language courses men oned above, the subjects had completed 4 consecutive, simultaneous, and liaison interpre ng courses. They had completed 20

translation courses in the following areas: humanities, religion, medicine, agriculture, media, engineering, physical science, business administration, military, education, commerce, agriculture, public safety, computer science, law, literature, social sciences, oil. DataCollectionandanalysis Data were collected over a period of 4 semesters. The EnglishArabic and the ArabicEnglish interpreting scores for both groups were collected from the final examination. Each final examination consisted of a set of interviews that was mainly in ArabicandanothersetthatwasmainlyinEnglish.Eachsetconsistedofseveralinterviews covering different subject fields. For each student, the EnglishArabic and ArabicEnglish scoreswereconvertedintopercentages. In the interpreting course, a series of graded exercises were used to train the studentstointerpretinterviewsformEnglishintoArabicandfromArabicintoEnglish.The exercises covered breathing exercises, speech shadowing exercises, sentence paraphrasing exercises, providing summaries in the same language of sentences and paragraphs, memory training exercises, interpreting easy specialized interviews with familiar topics taken from newspapers and magazines and represented current affairs in medicine,childpsychology,computerscience,business,religion,economics,politics. In liaison interpreting, the students practiced interpreting interviews in which the interviewer and the interviewee speak different languages (in our case English and Arabic). They listened to a question in Arabic and rendered the meaning in English then listened to the answer in English and rendered the meaning in Arabic or vice versa, without any previous preparation or knowledge of the topic. Formal and informal interviews taken from newspapers and magazines covering general topics in medicine, computer science, business, banking, economics, commerce, politics, law, psychology, education, Islamic studies. The material represented current affairs and developments in business, computer science, medicine, economics, politicsetc. Dialogs were graded in length,difficultylevelandtopicfamiliarity.

The two liaison interpre ng courses were taught twice a week for 14 weeks. They were both practiced in the language lab. In both courses students wererequired tofocus on the meaning rather than the exact words of the speaker. They listened to stretches of discourse only once. They were not allowed to take notes or consult a dictionary. The course material in both courses covered the same subject areas except for the difficulty level,lengthanddegreeoffamiliarity.Thetopicsusedwithbothlevelsdidnotoverlap. ResultsandDiscussion FindingsofthepresentstudyreportedinTable(1)showthatatthebeginnerlevel,

thetypicalEnglishArabicscorewas62.5%witharangebetween2395andthetypical ArabicEnglishscorewas61.5%witharangebetween3790%.Fortheadvancesgroup, thetypicalEnglishArabicscorewas65%witharangebetween3190andthetypical ArabicEnglishscore58%witharangebetween37%92%. Resultsshowstrongcorrelationsbetweenthestudents'EnglishArabicandArabic Englishinterpre ngscores.Thecorrela oncoecientforlevel5was.64andforLevel9it was.82.Bothcorrela oncoe cientsweresignicant. Analysisofvarianceshowedsignicantdierencesinthemeanscores(level5) F=3.9,P<.000ANOVA(level9)F=7.42,P<.000 Analysisofvariancehasrevealedsignificantdifferencesbetweenlevel5andlevel9 studentsintheirabilitytointerpretformEnglishintoArabicandfromArbaicintoEnglish. Table(1) Arabic English Mean Median SD SE Range 61.83 61.50 13.86 1.35 3790 Level5 English Arabic 61.51 62.50 16.60 1.62 2395 122.98 123.34 27.64 2.75 63185 Total Arabic English 59.83 58.00 14.11 1.49 3792 Level9 English Arabic 63.34 65.00 14.63 1.54 3192 123.17 125.00 27.46 2.89 73184 Total

 Conclusion: ThedifferencebetweenEnglishArabicandArabicEnglishinterpretingisthatin theformer,thestudentsmayhavetroublecomprehendingthemessage.Theywill havenogrammatical,syntacticproblemsinreformulatingthemessageinArabic. Inthelatter,thestudentsmayhavenotroublecomprehendingthemessageasit isdeliveredinL1.However,theirproblemslieinreformula ngthemessageinL2. Here,studentswillhavelexicalandgrammaticalproblems. Itwasobservedthatlevel5studentsaremoreuentthanlevel9students.They aremoreabletointerpretthecontentofthemessageratherthanthewords.On theotherhand,level9studentstendtolistenforandinterprettheexactwordsof themessage.Theyareslowerandhesitatemore.Theyaremoreproficientinthe language.