The Application of Reichenbach’s Model to the Translation of the Arabic Perfect Verb Forms into English
Ammar Ahmed Al Huraithi
College of Arts / Department of ranslation, Mosul University
Samah Mahmood Al-Ramli
College of Arts / Department of ranslation, Mosul University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/jls.5.4.2.9
Keywords: Reichenbach’s model, Chafean Theory, time, tense and translation
Abstract
The paper relies heavily on Reichenbach’s model of time whereby, the verb tense is employed to highlight the moment in which an event occurred in relation to the moment of its description. Tense together with time adverbs and adverbials definitely determine whether an event is reported in the timely chronological order, reversed order , or whether there is a time gap intermingling between the events on the time line or not. This paper addresses the subject-verb dichotomy, tackling the possible problems that translators may encounter in their quest to present successful renderings despite the profound differences between the two languages in the possible sentence patterns, places, order of places and the way of realizing, fitting and ordering elements onto the places. The paper aims primarily at probing deep into the topic by highlighting the characteristics of this subject-verb dichotomy. To achieve the aim, it is hypothesized that: translating the full stretch of the dichotomy poses serious problems for translators and that a sound translation can be given despite the divergencies between Arabic and English. In order to validate the hypotheses and achieve the objectives, a detailed account about the dichotomy is given, the major types, functions and features of the relation are tackled, a group of Arabic-English translation examples are selected and the Chafean Theory is adopted so as to help translators put forth some semantically sound and specially grammatically correct renderings.
