Difficulties Faced by Iraqi EFL Learners in Translating English Collective Nouns

The current study is concerned with investigating the difficulties that Iraqi EFL learners of English may face when translating English collective nouns. Such collective nouns as committee, government,  , jury  , Parliament , etc.  are considered singular  when the concept of  the unity as a group is emphasized , but when the concept of the individuals or numbers is emphasized they are treated as plural. A sample of twenty undergraduate students have been selected randomly to translate certain English collective nouns in some selected political texts in order to find out the difficulties they might face in rendering them into Arabic. It is hypothesized that most of the testees have used the singular form rather than the plural ignoring the notion of meaning of these nouns. Theoretically speaking, the most important conclusions that the present paper has come up with are: Firstly, English collective nouns may co-occur in the singular with either a singular or a plural form of the verb; secondly, in terms of form, three types of collective nouns can be recognized :  (a) invariable singular collectives, (b) invariable plural collectives, (c) variable ( singular and plural); thirdly, in terms of meaning there are two types of collective nouns , i.e. human and non- human collectives. Empirically speaking, the paper shows the following conclusions: English collective nouns are problematic and difficult to translate due to the disparity between form and meaning of both languages ,  the inadequate knowledge of the function of some structural clues in determining the emphasized idea (i.e., singular or plural), and formal equivalence and literal translation are used by most testees.
Keywords:  collective nouns , formal equivalence , meaning , political texts, translation