On Translating Arabic Verbal Emphasis into English

Abstract:

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The translators constitute facing a challenge in the translation of Arabic verbal emphasis structure. Therefore, this study investigates the translation of Arabic verbal emphasis category and its subcategories into English from semantic and pragmatic perspectives. It draws upon an examination of several translations of these emphatic devices and structures into English. Specifically, it draws upon the translations of Naguib Mahfouz’s novels The Thief and the Dogs (1961), Children of Gebalawi (1988) and the Harafish (2013) and Ghassan Kanafani’s short stories Palestine’s Children (2000). The study highlights the erroneous strategies adopted by the translators of these literary works and suggests more suitable alternative translations. As a result of several mismatches between Arabic and English leads to such errors. This study attempts to handle a gape in literature and help translators to overcome the obstacles they may face in rendering such Arabic structures in English. The article concludes that translating Arabic verbal emphatic structure into English would be affected by the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic symmetries and asymmetries between the two languages.