A Linguistic Analysis of Some Problems of The Arabic-English Translation of The Noun Phrase with Reference to Journalistic Editing

Abstract

This study aims at investigating some problems in the translation of the Noun Phrase (NP) from Arabic into English. Though there have been many dissertations which tackled problems of translating from Arabic into English, this thesis, to the best of the author's knowledge, is the first to concentrate on the NP only and dwell on some of the intricacies of translating this part of the sentence. The grammar that will be used in this work will be the Government-Binding framework-which was devised by Chomsky (I981) and which has been extensively discussed by his disciples ever since. One of the reasons why this particular type of grammar has been chosen is to cope more with modern linguistic theories; since most of the dissertations on translation the present researcher perused were tackled within a traditional-grammar framework. Another reason is that the GB Theory, as has been proved in the first five chapters of this thesis, has provided new insights into understanding why particular structures, rather than others, are preferred in the translation of any given sentence or part of it (e.g. NP).