On the Role of Verbal Particles in Bridging Tense Gap in English-Arabic/ Arabic-English Translation

Abstract

Translating some grammatical forms such as temporal/event structures accurately across languages (as the case with English and Standard Arabic) is not easy to achieve as languages have different systems to refer to tense and aspect. Grammatical forms communicate meaning and sometimes this meaning can be lost in translation due to the translator’s lack of mastery of both the source and the target languages, or at least one of them. Thus, event structures need to be carefully tackled in translation, and the translator, especially novice ones, need to develop a full understanding of the mechanisms that govern the use of such structures in the languages they are dealing with. Most importantly, they must be aware of the gaps that exist between those languages. In the light of this, the present paper sheds more light on the dissimilarities that exist between English and Standard Arabic as far as tense and aspect are concerned. The study highlights the gaps, and it shows that these gaps can be bridged if more importance is given to discourse clues and verbal particles mainly in the Arabic language.