Idioms are a very important part of the English language: you are told that if you want to go far (succeed) you should pull your socks up (make a serious effort to improve your behaviour, the quality of your work, etc.) and use your grey matter (brain).1 Learning and translating idioms have always been very difficult for foreign language learners. The present paper explores some of the reasons why English idiomatic expressions are difficult to learn and translate. It is not the aim of this paper to attempt a comprehensive survey of the vast amount of material that has appeared on idioms in Adams and Kuder (1984), Alexander (1984), Dixon (1983), Kirkpatrick (2001), Langlotz (2006), McCarthy and O'Dell (2002), and Wray (2002), among others. The paper concentrates on idioms as a learning-translation problem; it makes no claim to be comprehensive or academically rigorous. Leech (1989) defines an idiom as follows: “An idiom is a group of two or more words which we have to treat as a unit in learning a language. We cannot arrive at the meaning of the idiom just by adding together the meanings of the words inside it. E.g.John and Mary usedto be hardup (='They had very little money'.)”(P.186) To be more exact, an idiom is a sequence of words which is semantically and syntactically restricted, so that they function as a single unit. From a semantic point of view, the meanings of the individual words cannot be summed to produce the meanings of the idiomatic expression as a whole. Thus, fly off the handle, which means lose one's temper, cannot be understood in terms of the meanings of fly, off, or handle. The idiom phrase hot air, which means empty or boastful talk, is neither hot nor air; with hot air we are dealing with a set phrase where the meaning cannot be suggested on the basis of the two constituent words. The idiomatic meaning of spill the beans in So who spilt the beans (=told the secret) about her affair with David? has nothing to do with beans or with spilling in its literal sense. The foreign-language learner is left trying to figure out where and how the beans were spilt. From a syntactic viewpoint, the constituent parts of an idiom often do not permit the usual variability they display in other contexts. The point to be emphasized here is this: most idioms do not lend themselves easily to manipulation by speakers and writers; they are invariable and must be learned as wholes, but concord ofnumber, person and gender in the idiom phrase is still necessary, i.e. the verbs must be put into the correct form, and pronouns must agree with their antecedents: I don't give a hoot for her opinion! 2 • She doesn't give a hoot for my opinion! etc.)║He won, but only by the skin of his teeth2• She won, but only by the skin of her teeth• Iwon, but only by the skin ofmy teeth,I had to run for the train, and caught it by the skin of myteeth, etc.║He kept pullingmy arm, throwing me off my balance 2 • She kept pulling his arm, throwing him off his balance • We kept pullingher arm, throwingher offher balance, etc.2 The present paper is divided into five parts, as follows: Part I: An Overview; PART II: Learner’s Difficulties with Idioms; PART III: Some Pedagogical recommendations and Suggestions about Idioms; Part IV: Activities to Practice Idiomatic Expressions; Part V: Summary and Conclusion.
The present paper addresses one of the most challenging topics in translation; namely legal translation in the framework of two different approaches; the classical (formal) and the more recent (functional). The latter approach is the outcome of the process of simplifying legal language known technically as Plain Language Movement. The advent of this movement dates back to the 1950s, in response to the widely-held complain about the awkwardness of the legal register. Within this framework, the salient features of legal language, at the various linguistic and textual levels, underwent reconsideration in favor of more publicly digested expressions. The paper then subjects two translations of a lease contract to analysis in the ligh
... Show MoreThe study aimed to reveal the level of knowledge and tendencies of high- study students specializing in curriculum and teaching methods at King Khalid University towards harmonious strategies with brain-based learning (BBL). And Then, putting a proposed concept to develop knowledge and tendencies of high-study students specializing in curriculum and teaching methods at King Khalid University towards harmonious strategies with Brain-based learning (BBL). For achieving this goal, a cognitive test and a scale of tendency were prepared to apply harmonious strategies with brain-based learning. The descriptive approach was used because it suits the goals of the study. The study sample consisted of (70) male and female students of postgraduate
... Show MoreSelf-driving automobiles are prominent in science and technology, which affect social and economic development. Deep learning (DL) is the most common area of study in artificial intelligence (AI). In recent years, deep learning-based solutions have been presented in the field of self-driving cars and have achieved outstanding results. Different studies investigated a variety of significant technologies for autonomous vehicles, including car navigation systems, path planning, environmental perception, as well as car control. End-to-end learning control directly converts sensory data into control commands in autonomous driving. This research aims to identify the most accurate pre-trained Deep Neural Network (DNN) for predicting the steerin
... Show MoreThe paper aims to propose Teaching Learning based Optimization (TLBO) algorithm to solve 3-D packing problem in containers. The objective which can be presented in a mathematical model is optimizing the space usage in a container. Besides the interaction effect between students and teacher, this algorithm also observes the learning process between students in the classroom which does not need any control parameters. Thus, TLBO provides the teachers phase and students phase as its main updating process to find the best solution. More precisely, to validate the algorithm effectiveness, it was implemented in three sample cases. There was small data which had 5 size-types of items with 12 units, medium data which had 10 size-types of items w
... Show MoreOne study whose importance has significantly grown in recent years is lip-reading, particularly with the widespread of using deep learning techniques. Lip reading is essential for speech recognition in noisy environments or for those with hearing impairments. It refers to recognizing spoken sentences using visual information acquired from lip movements. Also, the lip area, especially for males, suffers from several problems, such as the mouth area containing the mustache and beard, which may cover the lip area. This paper proposes an automatic lip-reading system to recognize and classify short English sentences spoken by speakers using deep learning networks. The input video extracts frames and each frame is passed to the Viola-Jone
... Show MoreThis paper aims to examine the effects of the gender differences on learners‟ motivation in learning the four skills of English as a foreign language as well as to identify the proper types of motivation for males and females via a qualitative semi-structured interview. The findings showed that all the males have extrinsic motivation in all four skills. On the other hand, females differ among themselves in their motivation. In conclusion, it is also the teachers‟ responsibility to guide and direct their learners to achieve better outcomes in learning the four EFL skills.
An oil spill is a leakage of pipelines, vessels, oil rigs, or tankers that leads to the release of petroleum products into the marine environment or on land that happened naturally or due to human action, which resulted in severe damages and financial loss. Satellite imagery is one of the powerful tools currently utilized for capturing and getting vital information from the Earth's surface. But the complexity and the vast amount of data make it challenging and time-consuming for humans to process. However, with the advancement of deep learning techniques, the processes are now computerized for finding vital information using real-time satellite images. This paper applied three deep-learning algorithms for satellite image classification
... Show MoreWith the vast usage of network services, Security became an important issue for all network types. Various techniques emerged to grant network security; among them is Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). Many extant NIDSs actively work against various intrusions, but there are still a number of performance issues including high false alarm rates, and numerous undetected attacks. To keep up with these attacks, some of the academic researchers turned towards machine learning (ML) techniques to create software that automatically predict intrusive and abnormal traffic, another approach is to utilize ML algorithms in enhancing Traditional NIDSs which is a more feasible solution since they are widely spread. To upgrade t
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