Abstract
The main concern of this study is deictic words which are defined by different scholars as words or expressions whose reference relies on the context in which they are used. It aims to clarify deictics and their meanings within the context of the situation. It aims also to show how deictics works within context and indicate to the importance of pragmatics to determine the intended meaning. It is hypothesized that the intended meaning of a deictics can only be determined in the light of the context of the situation and understanding the exact meaning of the deictics needs two elements to taking into account; the physical element of the speaker and analysis of the deictics by the listener or the reader. The adopted model used to analyze the data consists of Newmark's Communicative Approach to translation (1981), Aziz's Contrastive Grammar of English and Arabic (1989), and Yule's Pragmatic Equivalence (2006). The first school or model is adopted for translation, that is, it is for translating English texts into Arabic and vice versa. The second school is adopted as the study is a contrastive study. Finally, the third school is adopted due to deixis is within the scope of pragmatics. The study has found that many translators, in addition to learners, could not grasp the intended meaning of a deictic because of the lack of the context of the situation or the cultural background. Thus, it has been concluded that deictics have no meaning at all if they are decontextualized.
