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Authors: Leila Mahfoudhi, Akila Sellami-Baklouti
Keywords: cline of shift, scientific research articles, multilingual meaning potential, transitivity, translation
Abstract: Multilingual meaning potential (Matthiessen, 2018) emanating from Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) meaning potential is considered by Matthiessen the basics of translation as the “recreation of meaning in context by translators (Matthiessen, 2018; pp 105). Any translation work requires a mapping between the two languages “to identify translation equivalences and shifts” (Steiner & Yallop, 2001; pp. 90), which is intended to determine between the English and Arabic languages in the present project. Indeed, it lies within the “research agenda” postulated by Matthiessen (2018) to develop “comprehensive descriptions of multilingual meaning potentials” (Matthiessen, 2018, p. 111) and within the framework of SFL implementation of different languages, including Arabic, in a computational system for language generation. Thus, it aims to identify the degree of congruence between the source language (SL) and target language (TL) choices, presented by Matthiessen (2018) on the Cline of Shift. To show the differences and similarities between English and Arabic at the level of Transitivity system, this project undertakes a comparative study of Scientific Research Articles Abstracts (SRAA) realized on a 200000-word corpus of English SRAA and their Arabic translations from the scientific journal Nature. The objective is to explore the grammatical system of transitivity in the English/Arabic SRA genre to identify the translator’s semantic and syntactic choices to manifest his/her positioning and cultural orientation. Since the SFL approach has been praised (Manfredi, 2009) as a substantial approach for the evaluation of translated texts, it is used as the framework for evaluating the Arabic translation of the English SRA. Actually, through a pilot study of 2000 words, a shift in the rendering of processes from English into Arabic, leading sometimes to metafunction shift or rank shift, has been shown, thus indicating a divergence between the two languages in their lexico-grammatical realization of Processes.