Redundancy and Ellipsis in the Translation into English of Selected Arabic Media Texts

Abstract

Redundancy and ellipsis are linguistic features used to ease language shift from the Source Text to the Target Text in translation. The problematic nature of redundancy stems from socio-cultural differences, religious, and linguistic issues. Languages differ on the degree of tolerance to redundancy; Arabic for example favors redundancy while English considers it a defect in writing. This study investigates how translation students in the Minor Translation Program at the University of Bahrain transfer these two elements in their translation of media texts into English. A news item loaded with redundancy in Arabic and 7 ellipted headlines were distributed to the sample.  The study revealed that a great degree of redundancy in both texts was transferred at the clausal and phrasal levels and a total absence of ellipsis in the news items. The ellipted texts in the headlines were also loaded with redundancy (62% of the texts) and fewer ellipted texts were translated correctly (38% were ellipted) in the headline texts. The results reflect great interference from L1 to L2 translated texts. This is attributed to the impact played by L1 in translation.