Translating passive voice from English to Arabic

Abstract This article examines the translation of English passive structures into Arabic commonly found in news reports. Drawing on Systemic Functional Grammar, the article provides a functional assessment of all strategies used in the translation of a corpus of passive clauses collected from a variety of newspapers and news websites. The main theoretical underpinnings of this study draw on a functional definition of language, assuming that changes in structural choices inevitably lead to shifts in meaning. The analysis, therefore, identifies the different meanings/functions that are made available by the different grammatical configurations at a clause level. The findings of this study show that translators adopt four translation strategies in rendering passive clauses: translation by using nominalizations, translation by using the active voice, translation by using a direct passive translation, and translation by using adjectivals. These strategies seem to correlate with morphological and syntactic specificities, which make their employment predictable. More importantly, some grammatical realizations of these strategies involve functional shifts in one or more of the three meta-functions of language.