The paper titled "Exploring Intricacies in English Passive Construction Translation in Research Articles' Abstracts by Arab Author-Translators" by Abdulwahid Qasem Al Zumor focuses on examining how Arab academics translate English passive structures into Arabic when self-translating their research article abstracts. The study aims to investigate the linguistic strategies employed by Arab researchers when rendering English passive constructions into Arabic in the academic genre of research article abstracts.
To conduct this research, the author collected a corpus of 51 English research article abstracts along with their Arabic translations produced by the same authors. The abstracts were from the fields of language studies, applied linguistics, literature, and translation, published in various Arab university journals between 2011-2018. Using corpus analysis tools, the study identified 208 instances of English passive structures and analyzed their Arabic translations.
The findings reveal that Arab author-translators employ several strategies when translating English passive constructions into Arabic: 1) Rendering passives into active voice (31% of instances), 2) Using periphrastic structures with the verb "tamma" (22%), 3) Constructing Arabic passives through verb vowel changes (19%), 4) Nominalization (4%), and 5) Creating new text that does not directly translate the passive (23%). The analysis demonstrates that only about one-fifth of English passives are rendered as passive structures in Arabic, with the majority being translated using alternative linguistic strategies.
The study concludes that there are significant cross-linguistic differences in how passive voice is handled between English and Arabic academic writing. It argues that these rhetorical differences are guided by communicative considerations and the need to avoid loss of meaning in translation. The findings contribute to understanding how Modern Standard Arabic expresses English passive voice and have implications for revisiting the pedagogy of passive voice in Arabic grammar instruction.