Expressions of Impossibility in Arabic and English: Unveiling Students’ Translation Difficulties

Expressions of impossibility refer to events that can never or rarely happen, tasks that are difficult or impossible to perform, people or things that are of no use and things that are impossible to find. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic expressions of impossibility, and the difficulties that student-translators have with them. A corpus of English and Arabic expressions of impossibility was collected, analyzed and compared. Data analysis showed that English and Arabic expressions of impossibility fall into 4 categories: (i) those that are identical in form and meaning in both languages (to look for a needle in a haystack, when salt blossoms, when heaven falls on earth); (ii) those that are similar in meaning but differ in wording (when pigs fly, on cloud nine, not in a million years); (iii) those used in English, but have no equivalents in Arabic (when hell freezes over, dance on a land mine); and (iv) those used in Arabic but have no equivalents in English (يريه النجوم في عز الظهر to show someone the stars at noon/in daylight). Responses to a translation test showed that student-translators could translate fewer than 35% of the test items correctly and left many blank. Expressions of impossibility that are similar in English and Arabic were easy to translate, whereas opaque ones (ghost of a chance, near the knuckle, dance on a land mine, عين الشمس ما تتغطى بغربال the sun cannot be covered with a sieve; إنك لا تجنى من الشوك العنب you cannot reap grapes from thorns; لما تشوف حلمة ودنك when you see your ear’s lobe; العين ما تقاوم مخرز the eye cannot defy a n awl). English expressions of impossibility were more difficult to translate than Arabic ones as they contained unfamiliar lexical items. Literal translation, explanation/paraphrase, partial translation, and extraneous translation were the most common strategies in that order. Detailed results and recommendations are given.