The translation of active participles and hyperbolic patterns into English

Abstract EN

This paper reports on the findings of a survey that explores the translation of active participles and hyperbolic patterns from Arabic into English.

The participants of the study were B.A senior students at the University of Jordan majoring in English language and literature.

The data were collected through a researcher–developed survey of 60 items divided into 30 target sentences and 30 fillers.

The findings suggest that the students’ translations were determined by several factors including the existence of equivalents for the hyperbolic patterns in English, having the knowledge about the availability of such equivalents, the belief that a word's class must be maintained in the target language in addition to the extent to which students understand hyperboles in Arabic.

Moreover, the findings show that the students rendered hyperbolic patterns as nominal, adjectival or verbal depending on the semantic features of the target word and on the availability of the same notion with the same syntactic class in the target language.