English Focus Structures in Arabic Translation: A Case Study of Gibran's The Prophet

The present paper aims to examine the translation of English focus structures into Arabic. The textual data is extracted from Gibran Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, being a good example of creative writing that may instantiate sufficient data of such structures. The extracted data (88 examples) feature four categories of focus structures: fronting (27), fronting plus subject-verb inversion (23), fronting plus subject-auxiliary inversion (28) and It-clefts (10). The findings show that English focus structures constitute a problematic area which requires a high degree of expertise on the translator's part. In addition to accounting for fronting as a major syntactic device for focusing a certain sentence constituent, which is successfully achieved in about two thirds of the examples, inversion and clefting as second-layer emphatic elements are largely missed in Arabic translation. The critical discussion of sample examples shows that such second-layer emphasis can be catered for by the use of both grammatical, e.g. pronouns or lexical, e.g adverbial emphatic markers, which can effectively support fronting and achieve a comparable degree of focus.