Syntactic Features in Legal Arabic- English Translation: A Case Study of Palestine Divorce Contracts.

This study deals with the translation of syntactic features in legal documents from Arabic into English. It aims to identify the syntactic features and to describe translatability of the syntactic features of Arabic and English Sharia divorce documents, accordingly, will help in assessing translators’ choices ad decisions. Being a qualitative descriptive study, samples of translated divorce contracts have been collected from Palestinian sworn translators and translation certified offices. Data is collected manually, and analysed using purposeful sampling, open-ended data collection, and personal interpretation. Analysis of the differences of syntactic features between Arabic and English divorce sharia court documents revealed that differences lie in the following aspects: the form of complex sentence structure, use of passive, use of nominal forms, binominals and triplets, modal verbs, conditional sentences, and the form of pronouns. The study concluded that the differences between Arabic and English syntactic features resulted in some problems of mother tongue influence, and using redundant synonyms and the literal translation of the successive dependent and parenthetical phrases which make the sentence long and complex, accordingly, not easy to be comprehended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]