Cohesion-Based Equivalence in Translating English Texts into Arabic: Problems and Strategies

Abstract

This paper attempts to cast light on an important issue which may pass unnoticed nearly by most student translators in the process of translating English texts into Arabic. Actually, the paper is about how to cohesively reproduce equivalent target texts. The study aims at (1) distinguishing a text from a non-text. (2) highlighting the main cohesive devices in English and how they are realized in Arabic. (3) pointing out some cohesion-related problems a translator may face when rendering English texts into Arabic. The study hypothesizes that unawareness on the part of student translators of the very nature of texts as instances of language in use rather than language as an abstract system nor a sum of its constituent parts may cause them to produce incohesive renderings where they fail to combine sentences into well-organized whole. Bad translation renders a text into a non-text in that it seems foreign even though no faulty vocabulary was found and no apparent grammatical mistakes were detected. The study concludes that nearly all the student translators failed to produce unified and cohesive texts since they transferred the cohesive devices of the source text which do not go along with the norms of writing the target text.