Idioms are a very important part of the English language: you are told that if you want to go far (succeed) you should pull your socks up (make a serious effort to improve your behaviour, the quality of your work, etc.) and use your grey matter (brain).1 Learning and translating idioms have always been very difficult for foreign language learners. The present paper explores some of the reasons why English idiomatic expressions are difficult to learn and translate. It is not the aim of this paper to attempt a comprehensive survey of the vast amount of material that has appeared on idioms in Adams and Kuder (1984), Alexander (1984), Dixon (1983), Kirkpatrick (2001), Langlotz (2006), McCarthy and O'Dell (2002), and Wray (2002), among others. The paper concentrates on idioms as a learning-translation problem; it makes no claim to be comprehensive or academically rigorous. Leech (1989) defines an idiom as follows: “An idiom is a group of two or more words which we have to treat as a unit in learning a language. We cannot arrive at the meaning of the idiom just by adding together the meanings of the words inside it. E.g.John and Mary usedto be hardup (='They had very little money'.)”(P.186) To be more exact, an idiom is a sequence of words which is semantically and syntactically restricted, so that they function as a single unit. From a semantic point of view, the meanings of the individual words cannot be summed to produce the meanings of the idiomatic expression as a whole. Thus, fly off the handle, which means lose one's temper, cannot be understood in terms of the meanings of fly, off, or handle. The idiom phrase hot air, which means empty or boastful talk, is neither hot nor air; with hot air we are dealing with a set phrase where the meaning cannot be suggested on the basis of the two constituent words. The idiomatic meaning of spill the beans in So who spilt the beans (=told the secret) about her affair with David? has nothing to do with beans or with spilling in its literal sense. The foreign-language learner is left trying to figure out where and how the beans were spilt. From a syntactic viewpoint, the constituent parts of an idiom often do not permit the usual variability they display in other contexts. The point to be emphasized here is this: most idioms do not lend themselves easily to manipulation by speakers and writers; they are invariable and must be learned as wholes, but concord ofnumber, person and gender in the idiom phrase is still necessary, i.e. the verbs must be put into the correct form, and pronouns must agree with their antecedents: I don't give a hoot for her opinion! 2 • She doesn't give a hoot for my opinion! etc.)║He won, but only by the skin of his teeth2• She won, but only by the skin of her teeth• Iwon, but only by the skin ofmy teeth,I had to run for the train, and caught it by the skin of myteeth, etc.║He kept pullingmy arm, throwing me off my balance 2 • She kept pulling his arm, throwing him off his balance • We kept pullingher arm, throwingher offher balance, etc.2 The present paper is divided into five parts, as follows: Part I: An Overview; PART II: Learner’s Difficulties with Idioms; PART III: Some Pedagogical recommendations and Suggestions about Idioms; Part IV: Activities to Practice Idiomatic Expressions; Part V: Summary and Conclusion.
The present study is entitled “Problems of Translating Holy Qur’an Antonyms into German: An Analytical Study”. It discusses some of the problems of translating Holy Qur’an verses that contain words so opposite in meaning to another word. The main concern of the study stresses some of the errors in translating the oppositeness of certain words of Holy Qur’an from Arabic into other languages like German, a problem that can be traced back to the fact that such words may have two opposites in meaning, one is considered and the other is completely neglected.
The errors in translating al Qur’an Antonyms can be summarized for several reasons: literal translation, ignorance of the different view
... Show MoreConstitute the relationship between the director and actor mainstay chock done to show art in film and television , both of which occupy what a big role in the mission accomplishment . The leadership of the director of the artwork in various joints require two features two important ( creativity and administration ) , The capabilities director of creative serves as an added intellectual and aesthetic saturated sensation that leaves its impact on all the technical elements involved in done. Either trait administration and leadership it is what requires multiple skills in dealing on according to technical standards and moral and humanitarian allow the transfer of ideas , concepts and visions to those elements to embody and implement the ki
... Show More
It is a well-known fact that publishing companies spend much money, time and energy in designing their book covers to attract potential customers. As the first thing people do when they buy or intend to buy a book is looking at its front cover. However, if there is a need to know more about the book, people usually look at the information on its back cover. This paper attempts to explore the persuasive function of blurbs beyond the constraints of the academic domain and consequently their connection with advertising discourse in two main sections: The first presents the concept of blurb and its structure while the second defines persuasion and shows the most prominent strategiesused in blurbs. Finally, this paper gives the conclusion tha
... Show MoreActive Learning And Creative Thinking
This study aimed at accounting for the role of talents management in consolidating organizational learning process at the Yemeni General Corporation For telecommunication. To achieve the objective of the study, the researcher designed a questionnaire and administered it. The sample of the study consisted of (166) employees (General Manager, Manager and Department Head). They were selected randomly out of a total Population of (291) employees during the Year 2019. The descriptive analytic approach was used t reach conclusions.
The finding of the study revealed existence of effect of talents management dimensions, all together and alone, (talents polarization, talents development, talents maintenance and ma
... Show MoreWith the growing number of Internet users, public and private arts activities have become increasingly popular. Adolescents have begun to establish aesthetic taste and new cultural values. This category is the most affected one by the published images and ideas especially in the social networking space and specifically the Facebook. It is the most important problem in their cultural composition. This research aims to detect the problems of social networking sites in nurturing the aesthetic taste of adolescents. The researcher used the analytical descriptive approach to obtain accurate information describing the current situation or depicting the social reality of adolescents. The research concluded that the public discourse in social med
... Show More
(1)
(2)
BP algorithm is the most widely used supervised training algorithms for multi-layered feedforward neural net works. However, BP takes long time to converge and quite sensitive to the initial weights of a network. In this paper, a modified cuckoo search algorithm is used to get the optimal set of initial weights that will be used by BP algorithm. And changing the value of BP learning rate to improve the error convergence. The performance of the proposed hybrid algorithm is compared with the stan dard BP using simple data sets. The simulation result show that the proposed algorithm has improved the BP training in terms of quick convergence of the solution depending on the slope of the error graph.
This paper is attempt to study the nonlinear second order delay multi-value problems. We want to say that the properties of such kind of problems are the same as the properties of those with out delay just more technically involved. Our results discuss several known properties, introduce some notations and definitions. We also give an approximate solution to the coined problems using the Galerkin's method.
This paper aims at providing the teaching staff members with the necessary skills so as to become capable of tackling various situations, and treating daily problems that face students learning Spanish as a Second Language. This is made as an attempt to make teachers of foreign languages in general acquainted with modern trends of teaching with less complicated methods, specifically in teaching e earlier stages of foreign languages.
Abstracto:
En el presente trabajo pretendemos dotar al docente no nativo de Lenguas extranjeras, con algunos de los métodos necesari
... Show More