Translating English of-Complement Noun Phrase into Arabic Construct State: A Parallel Corpus-Based Study

Taking contrastive linguistics as its springboard, this study investigates how English of-complement noun phrases are translated into Arabic construct state. A syntactic typology shows five syntactic classes of Arabic construct state that can be used in translating English of-complement noun phrases. These five Arabic renderings are morphologically, syntactically and semantically constrained. Moreover, the syntactic properties of Arabic construct state that affect English-Arabic translation have been analyzed. They are definiteness inheritance, adjacency requirement and word order. Finally, three sources of ambiguity in English-Arabic translation have been indicated; the absence of collocational clash, the absence of morphological clash and the presence of coordination. Moreover, three solutions are suggested. They are the preposition li-, resumption and indefiniteness, and head reiteration and indefiniteness. The study indicates that good translation should be based on contrastive linguistic analysis because it has been proven that translator’s realization of the morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of the construct state in Arabic might determine his translational behavior.