Investigating the agentive and agentless problem of passive in English and their impact on the translation into Arabic

Abstract EN

Passivization is widely regarded as one of the most consistently occurring device in translation.

However, the present research paper aims to investigate the grammatical and rhetorical problems faced by Iraqi EFL students in the Translation Department at Al-Iraqia University when translating English agentive and agentless passive voice to Arabic.

Participants were asked to translate thirteen English sentences into Arabic.

Moreover, this paper focuses on the strategies which were employed by the students when translating from English into Arabic.

Students have used special strategies to translate these sentences into Arabic.

Truth to be told, three of these strategies corresponded to Chesterman syntactic strategies: transposition (topicalization), clause structure change (periphrastic structure) and sentence structure change (unacceptable translation).

The students added another strategy which was acceptable translation.

For validity and reliability, the researchers give the result of the test to specialists in the fields of translation, English language and Arabic language.

Their commentaries and recommendations were taking into consideration by the researchers.