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The informants’ profile
The informants are final year undergraduate students (1) of English language and literature at the Faculty of Letters, Ben Msik, Casablanca. They consist of three different groups from three different academic years: 2003-2004 (75 students), 2004-2005 (72 students) & 2005-2006 (70 students). The students in their final year of the second cycle, (the first cycle also consists of two years), have to choose between majoring either in literature with the following main subjects: literary criticism, classical drama, modern poetry, or in linguistics with the following subjects: syntax, phonology, semantics, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. In addition, both groups have to follow a common core course covering these subjects: translation, the novel and stylistics (2).
Translation is taught only in the second cycle, i.e. in the 3rd year (2 hours per week) and in the 4th year (1 hour and a half per week). Generally, students’ attendance in all the curriculum courses is rather low. This is because, on the whole, the university education system in Morocco especially in the faculties of humanities and social sciences, does not compel students to attend lectures on the assumption that students at this stage are mature enough and can therefore follow university courses, if need be, from a distance by borrowing notes from their fellow students who regularly attend or simply by reading the lecturer’s list of reference books. As a university course, translation has not escaped this general trend of class absenteeism. However, in the case of the translation course, the poor attendance is also and perhaps more seriously, due to a widespread misconception among students regarding the nature of a translation course per se. By and large, most students tend to believe that translation is a course that does not necessitate any training or formal education. Moreover, they think that the dictionary will always be there to consult for any translation problem that may arise on the day of the final examination. To illustrate the magnitude of the problem, the number of students who attended the translation class during the 2004-2005 academic year was just 30 out of 72 students. This small group itself can be further subdivided into two groups: those who attended regularly, and those whose attendance was irregular.
The female students were nearly two thirds more than the male students. Most of the students were between 22 and 25 years of age: 26 students; the youngest was 21 and the oldest 32. Four students spent 6 years at the undergraduate level, while the others spent between 4 and 5 years (4 years being the number of years normally required). There were only three repeaters in this group of 30, i.e. they repeated one year in the
second cycle. Concerning knowledge of foreign languages other than English, all of the 30 students spoke French, and only 8 of them spoke Italian in addition. There was only one student who could speak five languages: Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, English in addition to Arabic of course.
All these students followed a two-hour-a-week translation course in their third year. This was an introductory course which focused mainly on interlingual aspects of translation from Arabic into English and vice-versa, following, to a great extent, the syllabus proposed by Mona Baker in her translation course book In Other Words (1992). The translation syllabus for third year students thus consisted of the following items:
x definition of translation and translating
x introduction to translation studies: theoretical, descriptive and applied
x special features of Arabic and English
x contrastive grammar (English and Arabic)
x word level translation: lexical meaning and semantic fields
x above word level translation: collocation, idioms & fixed expressions
x introducing cultural meaning: language and culture, cultural distance and overlap (ecology, religious thinking and customs)
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