The Translation of English Passives into Arabic

Abstract

Abstract The study aims to check the intuitions reported in studies on the translation of English passives into Arabic against empirical data that consist of translations of English passive utterances as they naturally occur in an English text. It inquires into the linguistic strategies and resources that translators from English into Arabic fall back on when encountering passive utterances. It is shown that translators employ many strategies with this order of frequency: nominalization, adjectivalization, passivization, activization and pseudo-activization. It is also shown that the claim that Arabic does not tolerate agentive passives is inadequate, since Arabic translators use a variety offormal markers in translating English agentive passives. Thus, the study demonstrates that English passivization is predominantly structure-based, whereas Arabic passivization is predominantly semantics-based.