Article published in:
Target
Vol. 8:1 (1996) ► pp. 97–118

The Translation of English Passives into Arabic

An Empirical Perspective

| Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan
| Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan
The study aims to check the intuitions reported in studies on the translation of English passives into Arabic against empirical data that consist of translations of English passive utterances as they naturally occur in an English text. It inquires into the linguistic strategies and resources that translators from English into Arabic fall back on when encountering passive utterances. It is shown that translators employ many strategies with this order of frequency: nominalization, adjectivalization, passivization, activization and pseudo-activization. It is also shown that the claim that Arabic does not tolerate agentive passives is inadequate, since Arabic translators use a variety offormal markers in translating English agentive passives. Thus, the study demonstrates that English passivization is predominantly structure-based, whereas Arabic passivization is predominantly semantics-based.
Article outline
  • 1.Background of Study
    • 1.1.Types of Translation Equivalence
    • 1.2English Passives and Their Arabic Counterparts
  • 2.The Present Study
    • 2.1Material and Subjects
    • 2.2Hypotheses
    • 2.3Results
    • 2.4Analysis and Discussion
      • 2.4.1The Five Main Strategies
        • 1.Nominalization
        • 2.
        • 3.Adjectivals
        • 4.Actives
        • 5.
      • 2.4.2Translation Students vs. Translation Professors
      • 2.4.3Formal Markers of Arabic Agentive Passives
  • 3.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 01 January 1996
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.8.1.06far
References
Al-Najjar, Majed F.
1984 Translation as a Correlative of Meaning. Bloomington: Indiana University. [Doctoral Dissertation.]Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight
1952 “Linear Modification”. F. Householder, ed. Syntactic Theory 11. Harmondsworth: Penguin Education 1952 31–50.Google Scholar
1980 Language: The Loaded Weapon. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Catford, J.C.
1965 A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam
1968 Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich.   CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1977 “On Whmovement”. P.W. Culicover et al., eds. Formal Syntax. Academic Press 1977 71–132.Google Scholar
De Waard, Jan and Eugene A. Nida
1986 From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible Translating. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.Google Scholar
El-Yasin, Mohammed K.
1996 “The Passive Voice: A Problem for the English-Arabic Translator”. Babel 42:1.   CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Farghal, Mohammed
1991 “Evaluativeness Parameter and the Translator from English into Arabic and Vice-versa”. Babel 37:3. 138–151.   CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1992a “Managing in Translation: A Theoretical Model”. Meta 38:2. 257–267.   CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1992b “The Arabic Topic-Comment Structure”. Journal of King Saud University 4:1. 47–62.Google Scholar
1994 “Ideational Equivalence in Translation”. Robert de Beaugrande, Abdulla Shunnaq and Mohamed Helmy Heliel, eds. Language, Dis¬course and Translation in the West and Middle East. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1994 55–63.   CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J.
1968 “The Case for Case”. E. Bach and R. Harms, eds. Universals in Linguistic Theory. New York: Holt, Rinehait and Winston 1968 1–88.Google Scholar
Khalil, Aziz
1993 “Arabic Translation of English Passive Sentences: Problems and Acceptability Judgements”. Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics 271. 169–181.Google Scholar
Mouakket, Ahmed
1986 Linguistics and Translation: Some Semantic Problems in Arabic-English Translation. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University. [Doctoral Dissertation.]Google Scholar
Nida, Eugene A.
1964 Toward a Science of Translating, with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating. Leiden: E.J. Brill.Google Scholar
Obeidat, Hussain and Mohammed Farghal
1994 “On the Status of the Equational Sentence in the Grammar of Arabic”. Abhath Al-Yarmouk 12:2. 9–35.Google Scholar
Saraireh, Mohammad A.
1990 Some Lexical and Syntactic Problems in English-Arabic Translation. Madison: The University of Wisconsin. [Doctoral Dissertation.]Google Scholar
Tabakowska, Elżbieta
1990 “Surely There Must Exist a Polish Equivalent: On the Inadequacy of Dictionary Explications”. Target 2:2. 199–218.   CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Widdowson, H.G.
1971 “The Deep Structure of Discourse and the Use of Translation". S.P. Corder and E. Roulet, eds. Linguistic Insights in Applied Linguistics. Paris: Didier 1971 61–81.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Al Zumor, Abdulwahid Qasem
2021. Exploring Intricacies in English Passive Construction Translation in Research Articles’ Abstracts by Arab Author-Translators. SAGE Open 11:3 ► pp. 215824402110475 ff. Crossref logo
Al-Ali, Mohammed Nahar & Fahad M. Alliheibi
2015. Struggling to retain the functions of passive when translating English thesis abstracts. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 25:2 ► pp. 129 ff. Crossref logo
Farghal, Mohammed & Abdullah Shunnaq
1998. Grammatical voids: A translational perspective. Perspectives 6:1 ► pp. 79 ff. Crossref logo
Sado Al-Jarf, Reima
2007. SVO Word Order Errors in English-Arabic Translation. Meta 52:2 ► pp. 299 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 07 february 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.