English Reduced Forms in Arabic Scientific Translation: A Case Study

The present paper is a case study of the rendition of English Reduced Lexical Forms (RLFs) in Majalat AlOloom (the Arabic version of Scientific American). It works with the assumption that RLFs can be problematic in Arabic translation because English commonly favors the employment of such forms while Arabic opts for reduced forms only infrequently. The purpose is to examine authentic Arabic translational data in an English text type (popular science articles) that usually abounds in RLFs, in order to see how translators render them into Arabic. The data shows that professional scientific translators employ various strategies to render a variety of English RLFs. While Blended Forms and Complete Form + RLF are the most frequent RLFs in the English corpus, Translation Alone and Translation + RLF are the most occurring strategies in the Arabic corpus. The study offers both a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data.