HURDLES AND DISPARITIES IN RENDERING ARABIC CONDITIONAL CONSTRUCTIONS INTO ENGLISH

Abstract

The current paper attempts to draw attention to the translators’ disparities and hurdles they encounter in rendering the Arabic conditional constructions into English via a contrastive perspective wherein the Arabic conditional particles account for the meaning assigned to the conditional construction while in English the verb tense chiefly indicates the proposition intended in the conditional structure which may not have any particle; and unless the intricate syntactic/semantic features of conditional constructions are fully absorbed, a hermeneutic, semantically accurate rendition cannot be attained. To avert errors in translating conditional constructions, an Arab translator needs to be heedful of the syntactic-sematic discrepancies. The paper also sheds light on a grave loss of the intrinsic meaning through seemingly literal translation even by renowned translators of a highly esteemed text like the Qu’ran from which the Arabic conditional sentences have mostly been extracted for an undisputable exemplification