Logos et Littera: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Text (Dec 2017)
Gender shift in translation from English into Arabic and all that aggro
Abstract
The present article examines how English grammatical gender is handled in Arabic translation as can be illustrated in a gender-loaded English text taken from the Gulf News English website. To diversify and corroborate our argument, the text was given to a group of forty students enrolled on Translation Studies course for the academic year 2017/2018 at Sultan Qaboos University. The article shows that the translation students fall victim to several problems, most likely attributed to the linguistic reality of the masculine and feminine genders in both Arabic and English. The article reveals that three strategies in translating a gender-loaded text are employed: (1) Source Language (SL) gender-free items are translated into masculine gender in Target Language (TL) in view of the fact that they are contextually determined or that they are closely bound up with unequivocal patriarchal domination in the Arab culture; (2) SL gender-bound items usually observed by complex genders (i.e., the addition of a gender lexical item to a gender-free item) are translated by means of explicitation whereby a that-clause or an astute feminine lexical item is utilised; and (3) the dormancy of a viable computer-aided translation (CAT) strategy is called upon, very frequently, when Strategy 1 and Strategy 2 are to no avail.
