Investigating French interference in Algerian students’ English-Arabic/Arabic-English translations of collocations

This study investigates the interference of French as Second Language (SL) on English as a Foreign Language (FL) among 89 Algerian translation students in their English-Arabic/Arabic-English translations of collocational false friends (adjective+noun collocations) which are rarely explored in literature. It investigates how the 89 Algerian students: (i) render into Arabic English collocations involving adjectives which are themselves false friends with corresponding French adjectives; and (ii) translate Arabic collocations, the nodes of which are synonymous nouns in Arabic to English nouns that are false friends with French nouns. Both the English nouns and the English adjectives are obtained from a compiled list of false friends between English and French (Thody and Evans, 1985). The research adopts a mixed-methods approach in which both a self-reporting questionnaire, adapted from other studies (Magno, 2009; Ahmed, 2012), and a 30-item translation exercise consisting of two parts, involving English and Arabic collocations, have been used. A two-stage collocation extraction process was used to extract both frequent and exclusive general English and Arabic collocations. The first extraction involved the analysis of the chosen 30 false friends to find their best collocate among the top ten collocates in both the Log-Likelihood (LLR) (Dunning, 1993) and Log Dice (LD) (Rychlý, 2008) score lists in the corpus linguistics toolkit Sketch Engine. The second stage was employed when an agreement could not be reached between LLR and LD. In this case, the bilingual lists were used to highlight collocates that belong to any shared semantic category between collocates in English and French. This process produced (i): twenty English collocations, the nodes of which are adjectival false friends with French; and (ii) ten Arabic collocations whose focal nodes represent nouns in Arabic, synonymous with English nouns which are false friends of French nouns. The results demonstrate that the participants adopted eight distinct strategies in the rendition of English collocations into Arabic and vice versa, the most frequent being literal translation, which, in turn, revealed instances of French interference. Interference occurred more frequently when translating from English to Arabic than vice versa, as evidenced by the better performance in translating Arabic collocations into English than in translating English collocations into Arabic. Moreover, while the reasons for Algerian students’ collocational errors were largely lexical, in some cases they were grammatical, underscoring how collocation demonstrates the inseparability of lexis and grammar even if they do not contribute equally to lexical cores (Gabrielatos, 2019).