Translation Strategies of English Passive Constructions into Arabic: An Analysis of Google Translation Engine Produced Translations Using House’s TQA Model

Authors

  • Nourah Al-Qahtani

    Department of English, king Saud University, Riyadh 4545, Saudi Arabia
  • Rukayah Alhedayani

    Department of English, king Saud University, Riyadh 4545, Saudi Arabia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v6i4.6905
Received: 18 July 2024 | Revised: 8 August 2024 | Accepted: 12 August 2024 | Published Online: 12 October 2024

Abstract

This study explores the translation of English passive constructions into Arabic, focusing on the prevalent translation shifts and the preservation of the source functions within this process. Utilizing a qualitative methodology, it analyzes passive constructions from an English economic-political article based on House’s (2015) Translation Quality Assessment model. It reviews all passive participles classifying them into verbal and adjectival ones. The research aims to understand how these translation shifts cater to the syntactic and semantic needs of the Arabic language, particularly how machine translation tools like Google Translation engine handle these transformations. Data collected include various English passive constructions and their Arabic translations, providing a foundation for assessing either their adherence to the target language’s norms and preferences or to the literal approach that may lead to affect such preferences and norms. Key findings reveal how Google Translation engine tends to translate according to Arabic norms and produce a natural translation while preserving the source functions. The five translation strategies used by Google Translate when translating passive constructions from English to Arabic in economic-political texts are: 1) adjectival phrases, 2) active structures, 3) passive structures with internal vowel changes, 4) verbless structures with verbal nouns, and 5) verbal phrases with 'tamma'. However, the influence of such an approach may lead to manipulating the source function, which may lead to misunderstandings or to unbalanced power relations. 

Keywords:

Machine translation; Passive voice; English-Arabic language pair

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How to Cite

Al-Qahtani, N., & Alhedayani, R. (2024). Translation Strategies of English Passive Constructions into Arabic: An Analysis of Google Translation Engine Produced Translations Using House’s TQA Model. Forum for Linguistic Studies, 6(4), 371–387. https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v6i4.6905

Issue

Vol. 6 , Iss. 4 (October 2024)

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Article

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Copyright © 2024 Nourah Al-Qahtani, Rukayah Alhedayani

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This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.