LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 17:10 October 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

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The Analysis of Grammatical Shift in English-Arabic Translation of
BBC Media News Text

Nael F. M. Hijjo,
University of Malaya

Kais A. Kadhim, Ph.D.
Bureimi University College

Abstract

The challenging issues with reference to translation shifts as one aspect for an adequate translation have been widely studied. However, the present study investigates the grammatical shifts issues within media translation settings, since “most readers are probably unaware of the role played by translation in international news reporting” (Schäffner and Bassnett, 2010: 2). Accordingly, this study attempts to determine the types of the grammatical shifts between English as a source language (SL) and Arabic as a target language (TL) realized when translating English media news into Arabic. Furthermore, it examines the quality of the source text message after applying the grammatical shifts. To attain the research objectives, Catford’s notion on Translation Shifts (1965) is employed. The research corpus is a raw data consists of 40 English written news texts and their Arabic correspondences which are collected from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) channel website. The findings show that optional and obligatory shifts have been applied. It also finds that BBC translators applied all types of shift in their translations from English into Arabic. Generally, translators of BBC News from English into Arabic applied all types of shift to preserve the meaning of the source text and to sustain its quality of the message. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that BBC translators failed to sustain the meaning and the quality of the message when they applied structural shifts of sentence structure from passive voice into active voice and in some cases of unit-shifts.

Keywords: grammatical shifts, translation, media news, English, Arabic.

1. Introduction

Before 1950s, linguists were investigating only the meaning and the equivalence in a translation between two languages (Hodges, 2009). However, linguists’ perspective toward translation through a linguistic approach analysis has been changed since the 50s and 60s of the nineteenth century (ibid). Many linguists such as Jean Vinay and Jean-Paul Darbelnet (1958), Eugene Nida (1964), Peter Newmark (1993), Roman Jakobson (1959), Werner Koller (1979), van Leuven-Zwart (1991) and John Catford (1965) shed light on shifts in translation in their works and studies. Moreover, the term used by linguists (such as Vinay & Darbelent, (1958), Nida (1964) and Newmark, (1993)) to study shifts in translation was ‘transposition’ and then the term ‘translation shifts’ has appeared for the first time in Catford’s work in 1965 (Hatim & Munday, 2004). Moreover, a translator should have a certain amount of lexical and grammatical features knowledge of both source and target languages in order to be able to convey the message in a specific context. However, there are some translation difficulties due to the structural differences between the source language (thereinafter: SL) and the target language (thereinafter: TL). Moreover, according to Baker (1992), these differences between the SL and the TL often end in some changes (shifts) in the message content during the process of translation. These changes might rise with adding information to the target text (thereinafter: TT) which does not exist in the source text (thereinafter: ST) as a result of the lack of a grammatical category in the SL in the time that the TL has it. Thus, Hatim and Mason (1990) figured out that the lack of a grammatical category either in the TL grammatical system or in the SL grammatical system, would affect the translator's decision and, therefore, shifts would occur.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Nael F. M. Hijjo, M.A. University of Malaya nael_hijjo@yahoo.com

Kais A. Kadhim, Ph.D. Bureimi University College kais@buc.edu.om

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