2.2.4. Results' Summary
2.2.4.1. First Year Students' Knowledge 2.2.4.1.1.
Linguistic Competence
The qualitative analysis of data provided us with the
existing competence levels among first year students. The quantitative
description helped us uncover the levels' distribution. Both provided the
following results.
English
Nineteen percent (19%) of the students could understand
written English to an acceptable degree. Thirty percent (30%) could remember
the use of a grammatical rule studied some months ago. Not all of them,
however, consciously master the rule.
Eighty-one percent (81%) (levels 1 & 2) could not
understand written English. Level 1 students (51%) and many of level 3 students
could not remember the mentioned grammatical rule. All the students (100%)
could not express one simple idea in one correct sentence in English. All the
students (100%) made serious en-ors.
In short, first year translation students come to the course
with very little linguistic knowledge. Even the few students who could
understand English need a great deal of time and effort to acquire basic
linguistic competence in English.
Arabic
Only 13% of the students could accurately understand an Arabic
written text, and write with acceptable coherence in their first language. More
than half of them had extremely poor linguistic competence in Arabic: no
satisfactory comprehension, no grammatical or vocabulary knowledge and poor
writing. Eighty-seven percent (87%) could not write coherently. One hundred
percent (100%) could not accurately parse an Arabic sentence. No one paid
attention to style or to punctuation.
Simply said, first year translation students corne to the course
with poor competence in what is considered to be their first language.
2.2.4.1.2. General Culture
Both qualitative and quantitative analyses of data supplied the
following general knowledge traits of first year translation students:
· Most of the students do not keep accurate information
about the TV programs they watch. This would be sign of `pleasure-directed' use
of media.
· A small minority appeared to watch the news, from time
to time. Even this minority seemed to watch the news without active interest.
This is
deduced from the uncertainty and the inaccuracy of the correct
answers.
· The choice of TV programs to watch also seemed to be
`pleasuredirected'.
· Most of the students could not make use of information
learned in cultural academic disciplines to answer general culture questions:
poor transfer of knowledge.
· Most of them had no or very little knowledge of important
geographical, political, economical or historical facts.
In brief, most of these students appeared to have no
consciousness of the importance of general culture.
2.2.4.2. Third Year Students' Translation Competence
2.2.4.2.1. Arabic-English
Waddington's scale (2001) was designed for second year
translation students. The quality of all the translations we evaluated did not
exceed the third level. In order not to repeat already mentioned information,
we can say that third year translations were barely at the third level of
foreign second year translation students.
It is worth mentioning that, through this investigation, we
came to know that students who held, at least, BA degrees in English before
they
start the translation course, produced the three best
translations of the whole exam.
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