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<p>Cultural competence is one of the components of translation competence, which requires cultural understanding and appropriate use of translation strategies to facilitate intercultural communication. This article reported the challenges that English students (<i>n</i> = 40, aged 22–23 years) encounter in translating cultural references from English into Arabic. The sample included 40 final-year students in the English Department who had taken translation courses at a Yemeni university. They completed a take-home translation task that included 14 authentic texts of 45 cultural references that were selected from translation textbooks in addition to British news websites. Additionally, they responded to a questionnaire assessing the level of difficulty of the texts they had translated. Results showed that their performance was significantly below the passing marks ( t(39) = − 11.03, <i>p</i> &lt; .001) with a large effect size (1.74). Despite this low performance, these students rated the task as “somehow easy.” The discrepancy between these students’ performance and their rating of task difficulty might be due to their unawareness of cultural references and their lack of cultural background knowledge. These findings indicated notable deficiencies in these students’ translation competence, thereby underscoring the need to refine the translation training in terms of objectives, course content, and instructional methods.</p>

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Analysis of student performance in cross-cultural translation: English to Arabic

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月29日

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  • Mutahar Qassem

摘要

Cultural competence is one of the components of translation competence, which requires cultural understanding and appropriate use of translation strategies to facilitate intercultural communication. This article reported the challenges that English students (n = 40, aged 22–23 years) encounter in translating cultural references from English into Arabic. The sample included 40 final-year students in the English Department who had taken translation courses at a Yemeni university. They completed a take-home translation task that included 14 authentic texts of 45 cultural references that were selected from translation textbooks in addition to British news websites. Additionally, they responded to a questionnaire assessing the level of difficulty of the texts they had translated. Results showed that their performance was significantly below the passing marks ( t(39) = − 11.03, p < .001) with a large effect size (1.74). Despite this low performance, these students rated the task as “somehow easy.” The discrepancy between these students’ performance and their rating of task difficulty might be due to their unawareness of cultural references and their lack of cultural background knowledge. These findings indicated notable deficiencies in these students’ translation competence, thereby underscoring the need to refine the translation training in terms of objectives, course content, and instructional methods.