A focus on idioms and learner strategies: How students solve the translations of idiomatic sentences

The area of idiomaticity is one of the most difficult for second language students to learn, something that can be related to the fact that understanding the constituents of the idiom is not enough to understand the meaning of the expression. Idioms are closely related to the world they exist in and are a broad phenomenon, covering all multi-word expressions. Furthermore, idioms show a connection to metaphors, which often function as a link between the language and what it represents. The aim of this study is to investigate possible learner strategies in combination with translations of idiomatic sentences, which have equivalent expressions in the target language. The focus is on how the students solve the translations of the given idioms, both from Swedish into English and from English into Swedish. The results show different categories of strategies but most part of the pupils tend to translate the meaning of the given idiom when they do not know the exact translation. Furthermore the results indicate that it is easier to approach idioms from English than Swedish.