Legal translation of contract agreements is a challenge to translators as it involves combining the literary translation with the technical terminological precision. In translating legal contract agreements, a legal translator must utilize the lexical or syntactic precision and, more importantly, the pragmatic awareness of the context. This will guarantee an overall communicative process and avoid inconsistency in legal translation. However, the inability of the translator to meet these two functions in translating the contract item not only affects the contractors’ comprehension of the contract item but also affects the parties’ contractual obligations. In light of this, the purpose of this study was to find out how legal collocations used in contract agreements are translated from Arabic into English by student-translators in terms of (1) purely technical, (2) semi-technical, and (3) everyday vocabulary collocations. For the data collection, a multiple-choice collocation test was used to be answered by 35 EFL Iraqi undergraduate translator-students to decide on the aspects of weaknesses and strengths of their translation, thus decide on the aspects of correction. The findings showed that these students had serious problems in translating legal collocations as they lack the linguistic knowledge and pragmatic awareness needed to achieve the legal meaning and effect. They were also unable to make a difference among the three categories of legal collocations, purely technical, semi-technical, and everyday vocabulary collocations. These students should be exposed to more legal translation practices to obtain the required experience needed for their future career.

Towards auto didacticism in the learning of English language in Malaysian universities, students are required to do oral presentations as an academic task such as presentations of articles reviews, book chapter summaries and mini or final project proposals. To conduct these classroom oral presentations, students usually employ a number of technological aids and resources such as computers, overhead projectors and Microsoft PowerPoint software to create their slides. In fact, conducting coherent oral presentations goes beyond the use of technology to include appropriate use of linguistic devices called discourse markers. However, the absence or misuse of these markers in oral presentation would not only affect the flow of the ideas, coherence of speech and organization of facts but might also alter the intended message of the presenter. The objective of this study was to shed light on the use of these markers by focusing on the types and functions of these markers. For this purpose, a discourse analysis approach was used in which the data were collected in the form of audio-recordings of students’ oral presentations, and then analyzed based on Fraser’s (2009) classification and functions of discourse markers. The findings of this study are useful for instruction of better oral presentation performance of ESL/EFL learners in general and postgraduate students in particular. They also add to the current body of literature in the area of discourse studies.