Unraveling Language in Literature: Narrative Sentence Parsing of the ‘Throng of Bearded Men’ and Its Literary Translation

The overall purpose of this study is to analyze sentences that are devoted to the description of the ‘throng of bearded men’, i.e., the Puritans in the introductory chapter ‘The Prison Door’ from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet letter (1850) (source text (ST)) as a literary text, from a linguistic point of view in order to find the grammatical features associated with these sentences and their language patterns. Furthermore, the study aims to examine Sidqi’s translated sentences from EL Shara EL Qurmozia (1986) as part of a literary translation for Arab readers (i.e., target text (TT)). Both ST and TT sentences are parsed with a view to extracting grammatical features. ST parsing is based on Leech et al.’s (1982) model of parsing, while TT’s parsing follows the system provided by EL Rajhi (1998). The method of analysis comprises two stages. These are (1) parsing of ST and TT and (2) comparison between them from a linguistic point of view. The focus is on extracting ST and TT syntactic features with the aim of providing findings related to both of syntactic structure and literary translation. The results of the study indicate that certain features are given in the sentences under scrutiny, such as passivization, distancing structurally related grammatical items, extraposition of clausal subject, among other features. In addition, the study provides the readers with concluding remarks to Sidqi’s translations of the sentences based on the results obtained from the discussion of linguistic observations related to ST and that related to TT.