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Translating English Perfect Tenses into Arabic: A Comparative Study of Two Translations of Pearl Buck’s Novel ‘The Good Earth’.

Research Department
Research Journal
BABEL, International Journal of Translation
Research Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Research Rank
1
Research Vol
52 (3)
Research Website
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/bab/2006/00000052/00000003/art00003
Research Year
2006
Research_Pages
243-261
Research Abstract

This paper proposes a model for translating English perfect tenses into Arabic based on a comparative study of two translations of Pearl Buck’s novel ‘The Good Earth’, namely those of Baalbaki (1988) and Iskandar (1999). It starts with a brief reference to Fayyad's (1997) fourteen Arabic tenses which will be adopted for the structures used to translate English tenses. Then it explains the study aim and technique. After that, it presents an analysis of the study results by discussing the different renderings of the English perfect tenses in the two target texts. A corpus of 215 sentences has been randomly selected from the source text, together with their translations in the target texts. The two translations of all the sentences are compared and analyzed in terms of syntactic and semantic features. The various Arabic translations of the English perfect tenses are presented with a count of the examples representing them in the corpus and their percentages. Then, the contextual reference of each translation is studied and accounted for.