Problems of Translating English Elliptical Structures by Iraqi Students of Translation

Abstract

This paper deals with an important topic in English language teaching and translation, which is “Ellipsis”. It is possible to define this term as the omission of part of a clause. There are different definitions of this term according to different scholars, for example Krapp (1970: 228) states that ellipsis is the omission from the expression of an idea of certain parts of the thought which may be easily supplied from the context. Translating and understanding sentences with ellipsis is realized to be problematic in a way or another. This study is conducted to shed lights on this problem and try to figure out solutions for such a problem.The aim of this paper is to investigate the ability of students to render into Arabic, sentences containing ellipted structures. To fulfill this aim, the study hypothesized that students of translation are able to translate finite clauses much better than those nonfinite ones without ellipted structures and that they can translate sentences with predicate much better if compared with other structures.Accordingly, a test is conducted to verify such hypotheses. The test will be conducted on 20 fourth year students from the Translation Department, College of Arts, University of Mosul with no female/ male distinction. The test includes (20) sentences with different ellipted structures, then the researcher will analyze their translations. Ellipsis is of many types, for example, ellipsis of subject, ellipsis of lexical verb, ellipsis of auxiliary verb, ellipsis of subject + auxiliary.