A Critical Study of Translating Some of Poe’s Selected Poems by the EFL Students of Translation Department

Abstract

The paper aims at presenting a critical study of five translations of Poe's poems by the students of Translation Department at Isra University. To conduct the study, the researchers chose five of Poe’s well-known poems and divided the sample of the study into five groups. Thirty students participated in this study. The researchers asked the participants to translate the given poems expressing the difficulties they faced as well as the solutions and the strategies that they followed to overcome these difficulties. The study took place in the first semester of the academic year 2021/2022. The results showed that the presence of odd and old words as well as the difficulty of guessing the intended meanings, were the most difficulties that the students faced. As for the strategies, the analysis showed that using different dictionaries to get the intended meaning and depending on the context to guess the meanings of odd words were the most common strategies that the participants followed in their translation tasks. It is expected from this paper to provide some recommendations for the students who study translation in different universities and the lecturers who teach translation to students at different academic levels on how to deal with such difficulties and the best methods to overcome such problems.