Translating passive verbs in English–Arabic parallel texts and their frequency in Arabic–Arabic comparable texts

Other Title(s)

أفعال المبني للمجهول : ترجمتها في النصوص الإنجليزية-العربية المتوازية و مدى ترددها في النصوص العربية-العربية المقارنة

Dissertant

Nasib, Ala Zuhayr

Thesis advisor

Khafaji, Rasul

Comitee Members

al-Khanji, Rajai Rashid
Husayn, Riyad Fayiz Isa

University

Middle East University

Faculty

Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of English

University Country

Jordan

Degree

Master

Degree Date

2011

English Abstract

This study aimed at answering the following four questions: Q1- What are the alternative options for translating passive verbs from English into Arabic and which is/are more frequent? Q2- What are the conditioning factors behind opting for one of the translation alternatives, rather than the others? Q3- What differences are there in the frequency of passive verbs in Translated Arabic texts as compared to Original Arabic texts? Q4- What is characteristic about the frequency of the passive verbs in Translated Arabic texts, viz.

their linguistic specificity, in this respect? To achieve these goals, the researcher selected his sample from a study corpus which consisted of two types of sub-corpora: parallel and comparable.

The parallel sub-corpus consisted of three Original Scientific texts in English together with three Arabic translations of these texts.

While the comparable sub-corpus comprised the three Translated Arabic texts together with three Original Arabic texts.

Both the Translated and Original Arabic texts were scientific texts, written in Modern Standard Arabic.

The present study investigated scientific texts because such texts make more use of passive constructions than others.

Moreover, all the nine texts in the study corpus roughly belong to the same period of time and text type.

The researcher used the descriptive-contrastive-interpretive approach.

The frequency of the passive verbs were recorded, compared, and investigated in each one of these texts.

The results showed that English scientific texts used more passive constructions in their sentences as compared to their translated Arabic texts.

The present study also revealed that there were many options available to the English- Arabic translator for translating passive verbs in English.

These alternatives were found to be: 1.

Translating the English passive verb by an Arabic passive verb.

2.

Translating the English passive verb by an Arabic active verb.

3.

Translating English passive verbs by Arabic nominalized constructions with the infinitive.

4.

Translating English passive verbs by Arabic nominalized constructions with the passive participle.

It was also found that the above four translation alternatives were not used in free variation.

Rather, opting for one alternative, rather than the other, was subject to some conditioning factors.

As for the comparable sub-corpus, it was found that Original Arabic texts exhibited more use of the passive verb than their comparable Translated Arabic texts.

This was found to be rather unexpected and specific suggestions for further research were made.

Based on the above findings, it was recommended that other researchers enlarge the study corpus, and also use different types of texts.

Main Subjects

Languages & Comparative Literature

No. of Pages

96

Table of Contents

• APA
• MLA
• AMA

Language

English

Data Type

Arab Theses

Record ID

BIM-693146