Obstacles Faced by the Jordanian Novice Translators in Translating Arabic Proverbs

This study aimed to explore the obstacles that Jordanian novice translators encountered when translating proverbs. To achieve this goal, a purposive sample of 20 Jordanian novice translators (males and females) was selected. A translation test, consisting of 10 Arabic proverbs based on Speakeʹs (2008) categorization of proverbs, was used in addition to carrying out informal interviews with four university translation Professors. The study revealed that the obstacles which Jordanian novice translators faced when translating proverbs from source language (SL) i.e. Arabic into target language (TL) i.e. English were: inability to translate culturally-bound words/expressions properly; using literal translation and misuse of the appropriate lexical words; committing linguistic, stylistic, and grammatical mistakes; and unfamiliarity with translation strategies and techniques.