Abstract
Self-translation of academic texts has received little attention thus far in literature, particularly in terms of how cross-linguistic features are rendered into target language. This study undertakes to examine the various linguistic strategies of rendering English passive structures by Arab academics when they translate their research articles’ abstracts (RAAs) into Arabic. Fifty-one English abstracts with their Arabic translations were collected from Languages, Humanities and Social Sciences journals published in different Arab universities. To analyze the collected data, #LancsBox 4.5 Lancaster University corpus tool was used to identify the English passive structures (208 instances) and to analyze some of their Arabic translations. The most interesting finding is that the Arabic linguistic alternatives diverge from the English passive structures and they include the use of Arabic active verbs, Arabic periphrastic constructions, Arabic passive verbs, and Arabic verbal nouns. The results cast a new light on the use of periphrastic structures. While the literature usually refers to the occurrence of this structure in journalistic Arabic, this study provides evidence of its occurrence in academic texts in almost 22% of the corpus. The increasing use of this strategy is a feature of Modern Standard Arabic as discovered in some corpora. The study supported the argument that Arabic does not avoid passive verb forms in academic discourse but expresses them by using stylistically different strategies.
Highlights
Studies on self-translation were integrated into Translation Studies in the second half of the 20th century (PanichelliBatalla, 2015)
The use of passive voice is a recurrent feature in academic discourse
Little data is found on contrastive rhetoric studies that explore the linguistic strategies used in the self-translation of passive construction in the English research articles abstracts into Arabic by Arab language researchers
Summary
Studies on self-translation were integrated into Translation Studies in the second half of the 20th century (PanichelliBatalla, 2015). It is very often neglected (Pinto, 2012) This category of translation has recently gained popularity among the non-native English researchers who produce research in English and are required by local journals to translate the abstracts of their manuscripts into their mother tongue. These researchers serve as mediators between “the original text and the readers of the translation” Given the potential differences between distant languages at all levels, it is expected that the translated abstracts are likely to diverge at some level from the source texts written by the same authors commonly known as author-translators
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