LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 21:12 December 2021
ISSN 1930-2940

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         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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An Analysis of Jordanian EFL Learners’ Figurative Competence of
Color-Based Idioms

Majd Abushunar, Ph.D. in Linguistics

Abstract

This study utilizes two translation tasks to investigate the competence of color idiomatic expressions of Jordanian EFL learners. It also analyzes their errors and strategies when rendering color idioms into English or Arabic. The two tasks include 26 sentences, each of which has an English or Arabic color idiomatic expression. The sample of the study consists of 62 Jordanian graduate students who are MA and PhD students of English. The results of the study reveal that graduate students do not have a very good idiomatic competence of color expressions. The results also display that similarities and differences of color connotations may negatively interfere or positively transfer the meaning from one language into another. EFL graduate students easily acquire English color-based idioms which have Arabic absolute or relative equivalents. However, they rely on their knowledge of L2 and L1 as well as the context to approach the meaning of English color idioms with no Arabic equivalent. The study concludes that graduate students usually translate the meaning of English color idioms using strategies of paraphrasing or giving Arabic equivalents. However, they tend to apply the strategies of paraphrasing, literal translation, and avoidance when dealing with Arabic color idioms.

Keywords: Color-based idioms, Contrastive Linguistics, Translating Idioms, Error Analysis, Idiomatic Color Expressions, Translation Strategies, Foreign Language Learning.

1. Introduction

Colors play a vital role in the culture of any community. The dictionary of any language is filled with color expressions that denote or connote a verity of meanings which are generally culture-specific (Kress and Leeuwen, 2013). For example, only in English, a person may use the color blue to express sadness as to feel blue. In German, on the other hand, blau sein (literally: to be blue) refers to being drunk. Nevertheless, in Russian the word (literally means light blue) means to be homosexual (Bortoli and Maroto, 2001). Thus, Larson (1984) stresses on the issue of understanding the cultural meaning of color before translating them into another language. Another difficulty in acquiring color expressions is that they are not always used literally. Many color expressions are idioms; they convey something different from the meanings of its individual units (Littlemore & Law, 2006). For example, white elephant means “a possession that costs a lot of money but has no useful purpose”. Following Grant and Buaer (2004) classification of fixed expressions, color expressions can be divided into categories based on two criteria, figurativeness, and compositionality: fixed expressions can be compositional or literal as green garden, figurative as white as a sheet, ONCE (one element is non-compositional) as black eye, and CORE (non-compositional and non-figurative) as yellow belly.

Color idiomatic expression can also be classified in terms of equivalence (Kvetko, 2009): (1) Absolute equivalence refers to color idioms that are similar in form and meaning. For instance, the Arabic idiom “the red light” and the English idiom red light are absolute equivalents. (2) Relative equivalence includes idioms that have similar or very close meaning but different lexical items. The English idiom saw red has a relative equivalent in Arabic “his eye became red” And (3) non-equivalence refers to idioms that do not have idiomatic equivalent as yellow belly which does not have an equivalent in Arabic. Another feature that makes color idioms difficult to acquire is that they have a fixed form. We cannot change the word order of an idiom, omit or replace one of its words, or change its grammatical structure (Salim & Mehawesh, 2013). For instance, in English, we say see red to express anger but not become or turn red.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Majd Abushunar, Ph.D. in Linguistics
Full-time Lecturer, Language Centre
The Hashemite University, Zarqa, Jordan
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7810-6089
majd@hu.edu.jo
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