Changes in the Syntactic Structure in English-Arabic Simultaneous Interpreting

Abstract

Simultaneous interpreting represents a challenge for interpreters working between typologically distinct languages, like the English-Arabic language pair. The present study is conducted to explore transfers in passive voice verbs between English as the source language and Arabic as the target language in a corpus of an interpreted English speech and its corresponding Arabic counterpart. A mixed qualitative and quantitative approach is adopted in the present study to identify recurrences of passive voice verbs and to explore the ways of rendering them into Arabic. Translation shifts are identified according to Catford’s (1965) approach. The findings of the present study reveal that nearly half of the passive voice verbs found in the source text are rendered using active voice verbs in the target text. The findings also reveal that there are four other ways of rendering passive voice verbs, including using a noun phrase, omitting a part of a sentence or a sentence as a whole, using a noun, or maintaining the passive voice form of the source verb in the target sentence. The present study contributes to promoting practices that enrich the field of English-Arabic simultaneous interpreting. It also contributes to enriching the research domain with its findings that hold special significance as the passive voice verbs constitute a divergence point between the two languages.