Syntactic and Semantic Interface in Translating Methods & Writing Techniques

Abstract

This paper is a culmination of long years of daily observations of the two researchers’ joint experience while teaching a plethora of linguistics, translation and writing courses at KSA Teachers’ colleges and Jordan universities. To guarantee the conformity and the heterogeneity of results, the analysis presented in this study is strictly confined to data derived from 120 writing and translation assignments submitted only by BA English students whose performance is good, very good and excellent. Therefore, this paper primarily explores and highlights major issues that explicitly exhibit aspects of syntactic and semantic interface in TEFL classes. The researchers have identified various methods and strategies that Arab students usually resort to while developing their translation/writing skills. Many of these writing strategies are based on various translation levels and techniques while translating from their mother language into English as a result of overt similarities or differences between the source language and the target language in terms of syntactic structures and semantic relations pertaining to their lexical choice. Noticeably, these strategies turn to be fruitful in many cases where the SL system and the TL system slightly diverge while they prove to be fully ungrammatical, odd and even absurd in other instances where there is an abyss of syntactic and semantic differences between these two systems.