This study aims to examine University of Bahrain graduating translation students’ use of creative microstrategies in rendering into English a news text and compare it with the translation of a Bahrain News Agency professional translator. The study seeks to identify the students’ creative microstrategies based on the classification proposed by Anne Schjoldager’s‘ (2008) model of macrostrategies.  The participants were 15 English language students with a minor in translation who were expected to graduate in the semester during which the study was conducted. They were required to translate a news text from Arabic to English in order to reveal the creative microstrategies used  and then their performance was compared with that done by a professional translator employed by Bahrain News Agency (BNA)and published on its official website . The findings of the study have shown that translation students are inclined to focus more on the syntactic microstrategies rather than on the semantic and pragmatic ones when processing and rendering the source text into the target language. Unlike the professional translator, students' lack of negotiation with and deeper analysis of the text has deprived their performance to a certain extent from the  creativity required in translation and rendered it into a mechanical exercise.

Redundancy and ellipsis are linguistic features used to ease language shift from the Source Text to the Target Text in translation. The problematic nature of redundancy stems from socio-cultural differences, religious, and linguistic issues. Languages differ on the degree of tolerance to redundancy; Arabic for example favors redundancy while English considers it a defect in writing. This study investigates how translation students in the Minor Translation Program at the University of Bahrain transfer these two elements in their translation of media texts into English. A news item loaded with redundancy in Arabic and 7 ellipted headlines were distributed to the sample.  The study revealed that a great degree of redundancy in both texts was transferred at the clausal and phrasal levels and a total absence of ellipsis in the news items. The ellipted texts in the headlines were also loaded with redundancy (62% of the texts) and fewer ellipted texts were translated correctly (38% were ellipted) in the headline texts. The results reflect great interference from L1 to L2 translated texts. This is attributed to the impact played by L1 in translation.

The use of native language in learning English is a controversial issue. Some studies advocate its use while others are against it.  As far as Arab Bahraini students are concerned, there are no studies that show whether translation is useful for students with different language proficiency and therefore, this study is filling a gap in knowledge in this area. This research aims to determine to what extent translation as a learning strategy is used by 4th year students and Orientation program students at the University. One hundred students from both groups participated in a survey with two sets of questionnaires related to beliefs and strategy use. The results of this qualitative and quantitative study have revealed that the majority of orientation students use translation as a learning strategy and hold positive beliefs about it, whereas a small percentage of the 4th year English major students still use translation as a learning strategy although they hold negative beliefs about it.  As a result, it is recommended that students at public schools should have more exposure to English language during English classes, enabling them to think directly in the target language without being pressured to use translation. As a result, the number of students in the University orientation program will ultimately decrease due to the improvement of their language proficiency.

As evidenced by recent studies in the fields of positive psychology and psycholinguistics, learners’ emotions and thoughts while learning a second language are believed to generate sophisticated and dynamic linkages that contribute to their motivational as well as linguistic outcomes. This study aims to evaluate foreign language gaiety (FLG) and foreign language apprehension (FLA) as determinants of the ideal second language (L2) self for Saudi EFL learners. The basic research question that this study attempts to answer is: “What is the impact of EL elation and apprehension on PSAU learners’ ideal L2 self?” An online survey incorporating the three scales in question was completed by 116 EFL male and female students at Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University (PSAU) in the College of Science and Humanities (CSH). To examine the reliability of this research study, the Cronbach Alpha value of ≥ 0.70 is regarded as reliable and acceptable. The study results showed a strong positive correlation between the PSAU EFL learners’ EF Gaiety and their ideal L2 self. Further, there was a strong negative correlation between the PSAU EFL learners’ FL Apprehension and their ideal L2 self. The study concluded that PSAU EFL learners do not enjoy studying English as a foreign language. Their ideal L2 self is tremendously affected by the high rates of apprehension and the low degrees of EF gaiety.

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