Translating Tenses in Arabic-English and English-Arabic Contexts

This volume is devoted to the translation of Arabic tenses into English, and English tenses into Arabic. Using a corpus of 1,605 examples, it is remarkably exhaustive in its treatment of the categories and forms of both Standard Arabic and English tenses. As such, it represents a useful reference for translators and linguistics researchers. With 260 example sentences and their translations, the book will be very beneficial to teachers and students of Arabic-English and English-Arabic translation.

The book is divided into eight chapters. The first presents the variety of Arabic that will be studied and explains why translation should be a text-oriented process. Chapter Two deals with the differences between tense and aspect in Arabic and English, respectively. Chapter Three proposes a model for translating Standard Arabic perfect verbs into English based on their contextual references. The fourth chapter shows the contextual clues that can assist a translator in selecting the proper English equivalents of Arabic imperfect verbs.

Chapter Five deals with the translation of Arabic active participles into English. Translating Arabic passive participles into English is handled in Chapter Six. The seventh chapter tackles the translation of English simple and progressive tenses into Arabic. Chapter Eight provides an approach to the translation of English perfect and perfect progressive tenses into Standard Arabic.