Students’ Difficulties in Translating Phrasal Verbs: A Case Study in Private Institution

Abstract

It is important to recognize that the role of translation is constantly increasing at present, and because of the growing process of globalization that is taking place around the globe. Furthermore, a blend of verb with adverbial like pick up , throw away or with preposition as try on, woke up are commonly known as phrasal verbs that are difficult for the students. Moreover, this paper aims to explore the difficulties that students face while translating phrasal verbs from English to Kurdish, and identifying the phrasal verbs that the majority of students find it challenging while translation.                         

This paper tries to find out an answer to the following question: What are students’ difficulties while translating phrasal verbs from English to Kurdish? Moreover, what are the phrasal verbs that majority of students find it hard while translation? Furthermore, the paper has been limited to 2^nd year students of English Department, Paytaxt Technical Institution_ Erbil for the academic year 2022-2023. The population was (30) undergraduate students. The data has been conducted by providing a test to the participants. Although, normally phrasal verbs are coincides that carry difficulties for English learners. Diverse factors have been pointed up which involve the way that phrasal verbs constructed and some other reasons like non-native surrounding environment, semantic and syntactic problems. The results revealed that there are lots of difficulties faced by the students while translating from English to Kurdish. The most important aspect in the difficulties is the failure to find the correct meaning for the same phrasal verbs in different context. Thus, the same percentages of students have difficulties in translating separable transitive verb along with intransitive phrasal verbs. However, difficulties in translating non-separable transitive phrasal verb were seen as less problematic for the students. The major phrasal verbs in which students find it hard while translation were ‘came across and passed out’.