Translation review 5 - Essay Example

A collective noun is a noun, which denotes a group of entities, and can be distinguished "from other nouns by a distinct patter of number contrast." It is therefore a single collective entity. It usually allows a flexible choice of pronoun as this can be either singular or plural depending on the perception of individuality within the group. As far as translation is concerned, the choice reflects a nuance in meaning relating to gender. English not only has a wider range of collective nouns than Arabic, it also "gives the speaker many such choices to express his attitude to the content of his message".

And, as with translation in general, there are variations in the scope of meaning of words between languages. In Arabic, collective nouns "can be treated as singular depending on their form, and they can be treated as plural depending on their meaning" such as in sa’ara and sa’aru’ respectively. So pluralization of collectives is possible in both languages though the range of collectives is greater in English. Using examples of collective nouns, this study tests a group of 20 college students in backtranslating and presents the results with analysis.

The hypothesis is that "testees are going to use the item group as the equivalent for most of the collective nouns of English." The findings showed that "most of the students faced problems in finding the exact equivalents for some of the nouns." The grammatical mistakes showed that "Arabic is richer in its grammatical system than English." The article addresses an issue in translation theory that has hitherto received little attention. It makes a thorough exploration of the issue of backtranslating by means of a test on sets of collective nouns.

The number of testees is not much of an issue because in back translating we are concerned not with the quantity but the quality of the translation and the semantic precision. The topic is a good illustration of some of the difficulties of translating