Obligatory translation shift as a sub-component of a model of quality assurance specifications and performance translator assessment

Abstract

The paper deals primarily with obligatory translation shifts involving translating English texts from and into Arabic and specifies the sub-components of a proposed model of quality assurance specifications and performance translator assessment. Obligatory shifts involve substituting English non-finite embedded forms with finite ones, lexicalizing certain grammatical elements, making agreement in gender between Arabic adjectives and nouns and Arabic nouns and verbs, substituting emphatic ‘do’ with the appropriate rhetorical device, supplying an antecedent to the translated Arabic relative constructions, transposing English initial noun clauses and sentence modifiers to post-verbal positions, placing the definite noun rather than its referent in initial positions, rendering certain English adjectives into verbs, nouns or adjectival clauses, replacing existential ‘there’ and the English grammatical subject ‘it’ with the appropriate corresponding forms, substituting the English comma with the Arabic conjunctive ‘wa’-and or ‘aw’-or as a linking device, deleting the corresponding form of copula be in Arabic interrogatives and replacing certain English noun modifiers with the appropriate similitude construction. The proposed model of quality assurance specifications and performance translator assessment examines the communicative, situational, semantic, structural, stylistic, pragmatic, textual, aesthetic, rhetorical, lexical and informational aspects of the translated text which are essential for assessing the quality of the text and the performance of the translator.