Syntactic Problems In Translation

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Syntactic Problems The various differences among languages cause many syntactic problems when translating the message of a given language into another. The number of these problems increases or decreases according to the degree of relatedness between the SL and the TL. The more related they are the less syntactic difficulties there are in translating from one into the other. In case they belong to the same language family as, for example, are in the cases of English and German (belonging to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) or Arabic and Hebrew (belonging to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family), less syntactic problems are likely to be encountered. But when the SL and the TL belong to different language families, as is in the case of Arabic and English, more syntactic problems are likely to be met. By nature, the ways of arranging signs in languages tend to be different. So, having the words correctly translated is not enough. They, moreover, should be arranged in a way corresponding to the proper syntactic and idiomatic usage of the TL. Otherwise, they are unlikely to be grasped by the TL receptors and, hence, unlikely to be effective. Among the syntactic problems often encountered in translation are tense, word order and syntactic ambiguity. 2.1. Tense Tense, as Comrice puts it, can be defined as the "grammatical realization of location in time" (as cited in El- Shourbagy, 2005, p. 27); that is, how location in time can be expressed in language. The ways of expressing location in time differ from one language to another. Therefore, the number of tenses and the aspects in which they are molded differ from a language to another as well. These differences in tenses and their aspects cause many problems in translation. The past tense in Arabic poses many problems in translation. This is owing to the fact that it is used to express

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