Hyphenated English Compound Adjectives in Arabic Translation: The Case of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code

The purpose of this paper is to explore the translation procedures that could be employed when translatinghyphenated English compound adjectives into Arabic. To achieve this, the study uses a body of textual dataconsisting of 100 hyphenated compounds extracted from Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which is set against itscounterpart body of data drawn from the Arabic translation titled شيفرة دا فينشي by Sama AbdRabu. The findings showthat the translator falls back on a variety of translation procedures including in terms of frequency: formal markers(prepositions and ذو -related forms), explicitation (relativization, generic words, and lexical comparisons), bare compounds, simple adjectives, passives/passive participles, and numeric compounds. These translation procedures, which interchange in some cases, may also involve certain semantic constraints. The study concludes that translators need to be aware of the whole spectrum of these translation procedures in order to be able to deal effectively with this morpho-lexical asymmetry between the two languages.