Effect of Gender and Language Proficiency on Translation and Judgment of English Contrastive Discourse Markers

This paper examined the effect of gender and language proficiency on the translation and judgments of ten contrastive discourse markers: but, however, nevertheless, instead, rather, in contrast, on the other hand, yet, still, on the contrary. The participants were 77 Saudi undergraduate males and females majoring in English and Translation. They were given two tasks, with 15 items in each task. Overall, the results showed that the participants were uncertain of the meaning of English contrastive discourse markers when translating them into Arabic, except but, which received the highest score. Almost all of the participants translated but as lakin or wa’lakin. However, the majority of them failed to translate those markers in combinations, reflecting their lack of knowledge of such combinations. The results also revealed that the participants were uncertain about their judgments of these markers. Their noticeable inconsistency of what makes a discourse marker suitable in one context, but not in the other, reflects the participants' inability to cope with its core meaning. As for gender, female participants scored better than their male counterparts in just four out of 30 constructions, indicating that gender produced limited effect on the participants’ performance. Finally, language proficiency only correlated with three constructions, pointing to the possibility that it has no effect on translating and using contrastive discourse markers. The findings demonstrated the importance of teaching discourse markers to undergraduate English major students to improve their skills of communication, translation and academic writing. The paper also highlighted the need for further research.