Cross-linguistic influence of English on (translated) Arabic across register and time: a corpus-based study
Against the background of existing corpus-based research on the recurrent features of translated language and language variation and change, this study investigates the effects of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) from English on translated and original (non-translated) Arabic, across two time periods and four registers. The study focuses not only on CLI effects in translation, across different registers, but also considers whether CLI effects in translation may be related to contact-induced language change in original Arabic more generally. It makes use of a custom-designed and -compiled corpus consisting of Arabic translated texts paralleled with their English source texts, and comparable non-translated Arabic texts, across two periods of time (1950-1999, and 2000-2019), and four registers (fiction, legal, academic, and journalistic texts).
Connectives, as a linguistic feature where English and Arabic demonstrate contrastive differences, is the main operationalisation of CLI in this study. A primarily quantitative methodology is used to investigate whether the independent variables of language, register, and time have any significant main or interaction effects on the frequency, distribution, and preferences of connectives and their logico-semantic relations. Furthermore, a monofactorial parallel analysis is used to explore the relationship between these independent variables and the choice and distribution of the adopted translation strategies.
The study aims to investigate three main questions: (1) Do English and Arabic texts, across different registers and timespans, demonstrate contrastive differences regarding the conjunction system? (2) Do translated Arabic texts demonstrate linguistic features that may be the consequence of CLI effects from English, and is it conditioned by register or timespan? (3) What are the dominant translation strategies used for translating additive connectives, and are these strategies more aligned with the source- or target-text norms and preferences?
The findings from different analyses confirm the overall effect of translation status, in terms of the frequency and distribution of connectives expressing different logico-semantic relations, providing support for CLI effects. In the majority of cases, these effects show how the CLI influence from English ‘inhibits’ the typical preferences of Arabic writing in translated Arabic, leading to a generally reduced use of connectives in translated Arabic. In addition, the study demonstrates that there is a potential translation-induced language change in some cases, most evident in the use of additive connectives, where short-term diachronic change is evident in changed preferences for use in original Arabic. Translation plays at least some part in this change. Furthermore, register has a strong and consistent effect on the uses of connectives, and the study also shows that both CLI effects, and language change effects are mediated by register.
