German compound nouns and the problem of translating them into Arabic

Though bilingual dictionaries (German-Arabic) contain a great number of compound words which help decode their meaning, a great number of these words are not listed in these dictionaries. This comes as a result of producing daily new constructions especially in the field of press and media, which causes a great difficulty in defining the meaning of these compound words. German Language Department students at the College of Languages and Translation find a great difficulty in translating compound words into Arabic, because they give literal translation of these words without doing any research for an Arabic equivalent. Since these words are composed of phrases or prepositional phrases, transference process to Arabic requires first to deconstruct these words into a phrase or a suitable prepositional phrase before starting the process of translation. The difficulty lies in the fact that there are no fixed deconstructing rules, which requires accurate knowledge of the characteristics of these words especially the way they are compound and deconstructed. The research attempts at finding a mechanism which students can practice in language classes. Later, in translation classes, this will help them to correctly transfer these words into Arabic. Adapted from the source document