Expressions of impossibility refer to events that can never or rarely happen, tasks that are difficult or impossible to perform, people or things that are of no use and things that are impossible to find. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic expressions of impossibility, and the difficulties that…

In an upcoming coverage-comprehension study, we plan to assess learners' meaning-recall knowledge of words as they occur in the study's reading passage. As several meaning-recall test formats exist, the purpose of this small-scale study (N = 10) was to determine which of three formats was most similar to a criterion interview regarding mean score…

Time metaphorical expressions are common in all languages and in general as well as specialized contexts. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic time metaphorical expressions containing , and the difficulties that student-translators have in translating them; the translation strategies they use and the…

This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic numeral-based formulaic expressions, and difficulties that student-translators have with them. A corpus of English and Arabic numeral-based formulaic expressions containing zero, two, three, twenty, sixty, hundred, thousand…etc., and another corpus of specialized…

The present research paper introduces a translation evaluation method called Calibrated Parsing Items Evaluation (CPIE hereafter). This evaluation method maximizes translators' performance through identifying the parsing items with an optimal p-docimology and d-index (item discrimination). This method checks all the possible parses (annotations)…

This study offers evidence of the impact of language background on the performance of students enrolled in an accounting study unit. It aims to quantify the effects of language background on performance in essay questions, compared to calculation questions requiring an application of procedures. Marks were collected from 2850 students. The results…

This study aims at investigating the challenges that Yemeni translation students encounter when translating neologisms from English into Arabic. It also aims at comparing students' translation with outcomes of machine translation (MT). The authors follow the descriptive and comparative methods in conducting this study. To achieve the objective of…

In this article we focus on "false cognates", lexical items that have overlapping orthographic/phonological properties but little or no semantic overlap. False-cognate pairs were created from French (second language or L2) and English (first language or L1) items by manipulating the levels of morphological correspondence between them.…

Previous research has suggested that some discourse relations are easier to convey implicitly than others due to cognitive biases in the interpretation of discourse. In this article we argue that relations involving a perspective shift, such as confirmation relations, are difficult to convey implicitly. We assess this claim with two empirical…

This article examines the issue of cognates in frequency-based vocabulary size testing. Data from a pilot study for a cognate-controlled English vocabulary size test was used to assess whether a group of Japanese university English learners (n = 60) were more successful at responding to cognate items than noncognate ones in three 1000 word…