This paper is an attempt to tackle problems and difficulties faced by the university students of English when translating alternative questions from Arabic into English in their written performance. A questionnaire of 10 sentences taken from Modern standard Arabic is designed and distributed to a sample of 40 students. The participants have been asked to translate Arabic alternative questions into English. It is hypothesized that the learners of English are not fully aware when translating alternative questions from Arabic to English. The study aims at examining the students’ awareness of alternative questions and trying to focus on the problems that students face when they want to express the alternative questions in both English and Arabic in order to be understood and helpful for learners, translators and other Article history: pedagogical issues. The findings imply that many contributors used synonymy and literal translation and different tenses to translate -Received:19/7/2019 alternative questions or they paraphrase the sentences according to their knowledge and perform the English equivalent. This is because -Accepted: 10/8/2019 of the lack of knowledge of alternative questions. Some Available online recommendations that can help translators, learners and students to develop their competence of alternative questions are also given in this study.