مجلة الدراسات الأكاديمية
Volume 5, Numéro 1, Pages 147-165
2023-03-30

The Challenges Of Rendering English Written Texts Into Arabic Oral Texts: Limitations And Assessments In Achieving Sight Translation

Authors : Saramad Mohammed Essa .

Abstract

Sight translation is a tool of communication used in the recent years to render written source text into an oral/spoken target text. This instrument is commonly utilized in translating court documents, short political speeches, and technical texts…etc. The assignment of the translator usually consists of two parties speaking two different languages and facilitated by an expert in sight translation. The sample of the research involves twelve novice student translators in the second stage. They were asked to translate a legal, political and technical written English texts into spoken Arabic texts. Due to the limitation of suggested methodologies in this field of expertise, the researcher suggested to focus on the methods to be used by the participants in the academic year of (2022-2023), and they were respectfully: attention, flexibility, speed, smooth delivery, clarity and transparency. Moreover, this research paper intended to detect and observe the challenges and constraints in performing sight translation. The students were divided according to their performances into four groups: below average, average, good, very good. The study came to a conclusion that the participants needed excessive training in sight translation. Inevitably, problems of reading, fluency, and public speaking emerged to be fatal factors in their performances. The study recommends that this topic should be mandatory taught in three stages in the Department of Translation at Al-Iraqia University.

Keywords

sight translation, interpreting, translation challenges, legal text, political text, technical text