Exploring Gender-specific Disparities among College Students in Translating Figurative Language

This research aims at advancing a new angle of awareness of the gender-specific disparities of translation strategies embedded in the translation of English figurative expressions at the collegiate level. From a macro-scope perspective, the females and English majors had a slightly higher tendency for a metaphrasing approach than the males, who embodied a more fidelity-based translation in this research. In a comparison of two majors, EITMs had a slightly higher tendency of adopting figurative expressions than the EMs, whose completion lacked a full consideration of cost and reward in equivalence translation, ensuring a meaning equilibrium between the source and target. Based on these findings, the explanation for such disparities lies in the participants’ awareness of their social setting which refers to the milieu in which their translation learning took place. This study, thus, puts forth the necessity of figurative language-related education at the university level, a milieu in which translation strategy-learning takes place, and it can scaffold the success of future qualified interpretation and translation professionals.