Assessing EFL Learners Translation of Humorous Expressions in Political Texts

Abstract

Humour is a common phenomenon. It is one of the most attractive parts in human communication. It is a universal aspect of human experience that conveys various meanings and norms from one culture to another. According to the definition of political humour ,it is an effective tool for politicians to either make themselves more accessible to the public or their opponents less attractive. The key problem of this study is that, humour expressions are usually not easy to render from SL into TL, as they may lose their humorous sense when rendered from SL into TL. As such ,the rendering may not be appropriate.The main objective of this paper is to assess EFL learners’ translations of the humorous expressions in political text from English to Arabic . Also, it provides a workable solution to deal with the EFL learners renderings and fill the gaps in SL text in a way that ensures the continuation of the communicative process The data were collected from third years students of the English Department, College of Arts. They translated some of the selected sentences from Donald Trump's speech. The humorous expressions of these sentences are analysed semantically and evaluated in terms of the basic translation criteria: accuracy, economy and appropriateness of Larson's model. Practically, this study adopts the Larson model of translation assessment for the humorous expressions in the political text. Furthermore, it adoptsNewmark’s strategy of Semantic and Communicative to the whole renderings of the text.