The use of Modern Standard Arabic and colloquial Arabic in translation tasks: a new perspective

The diglossic nature of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and the various colloquial Arabic (CA) dialects prevalent in Arab countries presents significant challenges for Arab students. These learners are often tasked with translating foreign texts into the MSA, a formal linguistic variant that only learned in education stage. To address this issue, the study collected a data from a sample of 60 Arab students who were asked to translate a 300 text into the MSA, CA, and English. Findings demonstrate that Arab EFL students score higher when they are required to translate into their CA than into MSA. However, and due to the lack of dictionaries, textbooks and material written in CA, Arab EFL students show a low performance in translating CA texts into English. Thus, this study broadens the understanding of translation as a complex task influenced by language acquisition, nativeness, and resource availability.