Translating Arabic Into English: Basic Considerations in Word Order

Abstract

This paper attempts to discuss the potential difficulties in translating Arabic into English with regard to word order. Arabic has a richer morphology than English and this enables morphological discrimination of surface grammatical relations in a way that is usually impossible in English. As a result, Arabic word order is freer than English with Arabic in general allowing any permutation of the major constituents without loss of grammatically or change in the basic cognitive meaning of the sentence. This paper looks at whether this flexibility in Arabic word order constitutes a translating problem.

Résumé

On discute des difficultés relatives à l'ordre des mots lors de la traduction de l'arabe vers l'anglais. L'auteur démontre que la richesse de la morphologie de l'arabe donne une plus grande flexibilité dans l'ordre des mots que ne le permet l'anglais et se demande dans quelle mesure cela peut engendrer des problèmes de traduction.