Arabic sentence patterns in interpreted, translated, and original speeches: A corpus-based approach
Aladdin Al Zahran, Rafik Jamoussi, Eassa Ali Mohammed Ali · Cadernos de Tradução · 2025
In simultaneous interpreting (SI) from a subject-verb-object (SVO) language such as English, Arabic simultaneous interpreters are confronted with the dilemma of choosing between the default, dominant, and unmarked V-initial or VSO structure, or a derived and marked S-initial or SV(O) structure. The choice of the former may cause memory overload and omissions or failure due to prolonged time lag and excessive storage of input chunks, especially if structural asymmetry coincides with such extreme factors as high source language (SL) input rate, structural complexity and/or information density. By contrast, the choice of any of the SV(O) structures available in Arabic can help interpreters closely follow the structure of SL discourse and avoid potential risks despite the shift of focus and emphasis brought about by the marked SV(O) structure. Using a corpus-based analysis of an English-to-Arabic parallel multimodal corpus of mediated and non-mediated discourse, the article seeks to determine which structure is used more frequently in simultaneously interpreted speeches compared to translated and original ones. The results indicated the dominance of the S-initial structure in SI, whereas the V-initial structure dominated translations and original speeches and that the choice of structure was impacted by mediation type (SI vs. translation) and language modality (written vs. spoken). These findings help relate the choice of structure to the SI process and suggest that the interpreters adopted structure-based processing. The results contribute to the research on a relatively under-investigated language pair and are valuable for informing SI training.