1. Translation of English genitive constructions into Arabic and vice versa
- Author
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Abdulaziz, Mohammed Alsaawi, Sanchez-Ortiz, Maria, and Edelstein, Elspeth
- Subjects
English language ,Arabic language - Abstract
This thesis explores the translation of genitive constructions from English into Arabic and vice versa (EN > AR and AR > EN). Particular attention is paid to possessive relations which are a subpart of the genitive relations. The thesis first introduces the main possessive relations found in English and Arabic and draws a comparison between the two languages with respect to how possessive constructions are made. The study finds that the construct state nominals is the primary strategy used in the Arabic language to express possessive relations. However, there are other strategies which are used to a lesser extent. As for English, the study finds that of-strategy, the genitive 's strategy, with-strategy, and compounds are all used in this language to express possessive relations, with unique properties for each. For instance, the genitive 's strategy is much used to express possession where the possessor is animate as in John's hand, whereas the of-strategy is much used with alienable possession as in the law of the country or when the possessor is not animate. On the other hand, compounds are also used to express alienable possession especially when the possessor is not a human as in the city centre. In order to determine the main difficulties that face translators when rendering English genitive constructions into Arabic and vice versa, a sample of undergraduate students, postgraduate students, and novice translators are asked to translate 30 sentences containing various possessive constructions from English/Arabic into Arabic/English (15 sentences from English into Arabic, and other 15 sentences from Arabic into English). The selected sentences are based on Duff's (1989) criteria of difficulty scale (easy, medium, and difficult). The optimal translations of the selected sentences are provided by 10 professional translators who are later asked to evaluate the translations of the selected sample and comment on the main problems that translators face when rendering possessive constructions. The translations of the study sample members are explored and compared to each other. It turns out that undergraduate translators face many problems when translating possessive conditions from Arabic into English or vice versa. The undergraduate students are not keen to select the most equivalent constructions; the construct state nominal is the main strategy they use to render English possessive constructions into Arabic. Additionally, of-strategy is the main strategy used by undergraduate students to translate Arabic possessive constructions into English. On the other hand, postgraduate students and novice translators show better performance as they used various possessive constructions, seeking for achieving better equivalence between the target and source texts. The differences between the study sample members are explored using the Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1987a, b, 1995, 1998, 2002 and subsequentwork), arguing that undergraduate students attempt to use the strategy that is most common in their source language, a matter that is best viewed as a negative transfer of the first language. As for postgraduate students and novice translators, the study argues that they are keen to express the true possessive relations in their translation, using different possessive construction as a result. Postgraduate students and novice translators are shown to be more equivalence wise, whereas undergraduate students are shown to use possessive constructions which are similar to their first language.
- Published
- 2022