Investigating Linguistic Problems faced by Translators when Rendering Emerging Scientific Discourse into Arabic

Abstract

Scientific translation is a daunting task, particularly into Arabic, simply because a translator is always faced with new scientific concepts. This requires a high level of both linguistic knowledge and scientific background. As science and technology developed, new English words are used to express new concepts, techniques and inventions that come into existence. This development has brought to Arabic serious linguistics problems of expressing this ever-expanding wave of newly-founded concepts and techniques for which no equivalents in Arabic exist. Translation of sciences from English into Arabic poses huge linguistic obstacles, yet a significant one, runs as follows: translation of scientific terms is considered as a real intellectual challenge. It requires skills, intelligence and a mastery of both English and Arabic. Arabic suffers a serious shortage of vocabulary that covers fields of technology and science; therefore translators should consider this problem before anything else. The researcher used a test and a questionnaire, the sample were 50 students and 12 colleagues from Sudan University for Science and Technology for the questionnaire. This study aims to investigate linguistic problems encountering translators when rendering scientific discourse into Arabic; it is an attempt to investigate some lexical problems that come as a result of bad translation, it will also highlight some problems pertaining to sentence structure building as far as translation of scientific texts is concerned. Finally it will decide whether scientific background is significally important or not for rendering recent scientific discourse into Arabic. This study will collect data through two ways: a test and a questionnaire, and will adopt the analytical descriptive method. In the light of the final findings the researcher found that: a wrong lexical choice can be problematic to translation of recent scientific discourse into Arabic, also wrong sentence structure building. It is found that sufficient scientific background is significant in translation of scientific texts into Arabic. The researcher recommended that a scientific translator should have practical experience in translating from related fields, and must have a firm master of both source and target languages and should develop a high degree of linguistic and scientific knowledge.