Creativity In The Use of Translation Microstrategies By Translation Students At The University of Bahrain

Abstract

This study aims to examine University of Bahrain graduating translation students’ use of creative microstrategies in rendering into English a news text and compare it with the translation of a Bahrain News Agency professional translator. The study seeks to identify the students’ creative microstrategies based on the classification proposed by Anne Schjoldager’s‘ (2008) model of macrostrategies.  The participants were 15 English language students with a minor in translation who were expected to graduate in the semester during which the study was conducted. They were required to translate a news text from Arabic to English in order to reveal the creative microstrategies used  and then their performance was compared with that done by a professional translator employed by Bahrain News Agency (BNA)and published on its official website . The findings of the study have shown that translation students are inclined to focus more on the syntactic microstrategies rather than on the semantic and pragmatic ones when processing and rendering the source text into the target language. Unlike the professional translator, students' lack of negotiation with and deeper analysis of the text has deprived their performance to a certain extent from the  creativity required in translation and rendered it into a mechanical exercise.