PhD Degree Awarded to Researcher Widad Abdulkarim Taher Al-Mekhlafi in Linguistics

Researcher Widad Abdulkarim Taher Al-Mekhlafi ‎was awarded a PhD degree in Linguistics‎ for her dissertation titled: Translating Grammatical Collocations in English Contract Agreements by Yemeni Translators: A Corpus-Based Translation Study, which was submitted to the Department of English Language, Faculty of Languages–Sana’a University. The dissertation defense was held on Thursday, September 10, 2026.

The PhD Viva-Voce Committee, which was formed based on a resolution issued by the Graduate Studies and Scientific Research Council, consisted of the following:

• Abdulsalam Mohammed Ghalib Al-Ghurafi – Sana’a University – Principal Supervisor and Committee Member
• Abdulhameed Abdulwahid AShujaa – Sana’a University – Internal Examiner and Committee Chair.
• Prof. Iman Mohammed Mohammed Barakat – University of Science and Technology – External Examiner and Committee Member.

The dissertation aimed to extract grammatical collocations from English contract agreements translated by Yemeni translators, analyze and classify them, identify their Arabic equivalents, and document these equivalents according to the patterns used in the translated texts. It also sought to compile a terminology glossary of grammatical collocations in an attempt to contribute to standardizing their Arabic equivalents among Yemeni translators.

The dissertation reached a number of findings, including the presence of considerable variation and semantic and syntactic discrepancies among Yemeni translators in the Arabic equivalents used to translate the English grammatical collocations extracted from the corpus of contract agreements selected for the study.

The main finding of the study, following a detailed analysis of the selected texts using SDL Trados Studio and its five tools, was the development of the proposed glossary. The glossary contains 345 English grammatical collocations and their Arabic equivalents, providing accurate translation alternatives that contribute to reducing semantic variation, ensuring stylistic consistency, and standardizing the translation of these collocations into Arabic among Yemeni translators.

The researcher made a number of recommendations in her dissertation, including the need for the glossary to be reviewed by specialized Yemeni translators, formally adopted, disseminated, and published in order to standardize the Arabic equivalents of English grammatical collocations and ensure consistency. She also recommended giving these structures particular attention in translator-training programs and specialized bilingual dictionaries to reduce literal translation, as well as expanding the use of computational linguistics methodologies and parallel corpora to investigate patterns and new fields of knowledge

The dissertation defense was attended by a number of academics, postgraduate students, researchers, as well as the researcher’s colleagues and family members.