The Title: The Difficulties of Translating Modal Verbs from

English into Arabic: Case of Second Year Students of English of

University 3 -Constantine

Statement of the Problem

English and Arabic are two different languages that vary in

terms of structure and function. Thus, students find various

problems in dealing with translation. One of the major problems

that students most face most is the translation of modal verbs.

Modal verbsThey are used in both English and Arabic to mark

possibility, obligation, permission, probability, certainty or

requirement. This can cause confusion in distinguishing ction which

modal is supposed to be used in the counterpart due to its

ambiguity and decontextualization. So, a research is needed For that

we want to explore this piece of research to determine know the some of

main difficulties that second year students may facefind in

translating modal verbs from English into Arabic..

The Aaim of the Sstudy

The overall aim of this piece of research is to examine how

modal verbs are expressed and interpreted from English into

Arabic. It targets And what are the difficulties encounter students

common difficulties while translating modal verbs since there is a

huge confusion in using modals in terms of their meaning and the

context tend to occur in.

Research Questions

The research addressesd the following main questions:

1- Do English modal verbs have equivalent counterpart in

Arabic?
2- What kind of difficulties students face while translating

modal verbs into Arabic?

Hypothesis

We hypothesize that:

If English modal verbs have no one- to- one equivalent in Arabic,

students will not be able to translate them successfully.

Tools of Rresearch
 To investigate the validity of thise hypothesis, a test- a task

completion- is devised because it is one of the most suitable

methodology procedure. It will focus on the contrastive study of

modal verbs between English and Arabic, and it will be addressed

to a sample of second year English students of university 3 at

Constantine. Sstudents will be asked to distinguish between modal

verbs in given contexts. .In addition to that, theyThey will also

answer a questionnaire about the problems they are facing while

translating modal verbs. .The results obtained will be analyzed in

accordance with the provided literature review.

Structure of the Study thesis

The present piece of research will be divided into two major

parts, a theoretical part and practical one.

The theoretical part is concerned with a literature review of the

concept of translation, in addition to different definitions of modal

verbs, the way they are expressed in a context, their types and

classes. We will include also full description of English modal

verbs in Arabic to facilitate the contrastive study.

The practical part includes data collection and their analysis to

tackle the issue successfully.