Conjunction in translation from English to Arabic: a corpus-based study

Against the background of existing corpus-based research on the recurrent features of translated language, this study set out to investigate two main research questions: (1) What are the differences between translated and non-translated Arabic regarding the use of conjunctive markers? (2) What are the differences in register-related preferences for conjunctive markers between translated and non-translated Arabic? This study was conducted utilising a comparable corpus of translated and non-translated Arabic across two registers, namely creative fiction and legal texts. Conjunctive markers, as a cohesive pattern, were used as an operationalisation to investigate five features of translated language in this language pair: explicitation, simplification, normalisation, levelling out, and interference. A quantitative and qualitative analysis was carried out to investigate whether the independent variables of corpus and register have any significant main effects on the frequency of a set of conjunctive markers, as well as whether there is a significant interaction in the effects of these independent variables on the frequency of conjunctive markers. The findings from the investigation confirm that there are some differences between conjunction use in translated and non-translated Arabic, providing some support for features such as interference, normalisation and explicitation. Register has a strong and consistent effect on conjunction use, and the study also demonstrates that there are interaction effects between translation status and register that are specific to particular conjunctions, such that explicitation effects are only evident in some registers and not others, and only for particular conjunctions.