The Effect of Using Electronic Dictionaries on the Quality of Students’ Translation

Abstract

This study aims to explore the advantages of electronic dictionaries towards EFL learners together with the difficulties faced when using electronic dictionaries, the frequency of dictionary use, and the disadvantages such dictionaries have when they are used in translation tasks. Two data collection instruments were employed in this study, namely a Likert scale questionnaire and an English–Arabic translation test; a sum of (40) students at Misurata University in Libya was chosen randomly to be the research community. The findings revealed that although electronic dictionaries provide some benefits that make the act of translation easier and faster, they also have several limitations that seriously and negatively affect the translation since the act of translation is not accompanied by human translation. These limitations include: lexical ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity, grammatical limitations, inability to find a target language equivalent and lack of awareness of pragmatic and semantic characteristics of the given text.