Investigating Category Translation Shifts of a BBC News Article from English into Arabic

Abstract

Investigating translation shifts in the translation of news articles has not received much attention despite its paramount importance in how translators produce adequate translations. Indeed, news translation is considered to be understudied in the field of translation. The current research aims at identifying the types of category shifts that have occurred and the most employed ones in the selected corpus.This study offers also an understanding of the category shifts that occur concerning translating news reports or stories. Accordingly, the study will explore the translation of a news article from English into Arabic; the news article titled ‘North Korea ‘preparing rocket launch’, images suggest’ is published on BBC news website 9 March 2019 together with its translation which was found on the BBC Arabic news website. To attain the research objectives, a comparative investigation of the English source text and the Arabic target text will be needed to look into the use of category shifts following Catford’s typology of category shifts. This study adopted a qualitative and quantitative method in identifying what kinds of category shifts occurred and the most frequent ones in the analyzed news text. The findings show that all types of category shifts were employed in the translation with a total of 35 shifts. The most employed type of category shift is structural shifts which are exemplified through 16 cases. These structural shifts are illustrated in word-order, passive-active, or nominal-verbal sentence structures. The least applied category shifts in the process of translation are class shifts which indicate that the translator found target text equivalences that have the same part of speech of the source text items. The study concludes that category shifts were employed in the translation to fill the linguistic gap between the two languages.