Effects of Structural Context Integration on Ambiguity Elimination for Students of Translation

Linguistic ambiguity causes translation students to be confronted with several problems in the translation process from Arabic into English. This causes their translation to be inconsistent with the professional standards of translation. Thus, this study is concerned with the effects of structural context integration on ambiguity elimination for the students of translation. It aims to identify the negative effect of the ambiguity aspects in Arabic by answering the questions of the study. These questions are: What is the effect of the modes of structural context integration on improving the translation of undergraduate Translation students? Does each way of structural context integration have the same effect on ambiguity aspects? The instrument used in this study to answer these questions was a diagnostic test. This test gauged the performance of two groups (15 each) of undergraduate Translation students at the German-Jordanian University. They were asked to translate (24) sentences that included an ambiguity at one of the four levels of the Arabic Language. The (t-test) was utilized to test the statistical significance of the differences between the two groups. Results showed statistically significant differences in mean scores between the experimental group and control group to the reference of the experimental group. It was found that the phenomenon of ambiguity in Arabic has negatively affected the performance of translation students, while the structural context integration has significantly contributed to the enhancement of students’ performance, probably due to the study plans of Translation Department which do not include any study materials that contribute to increase the students’ awareness of significant Arabic language details related to phonology, morphology, syntax and lexical items.