Student Translators Between Pedagogical Grammars and Language at Work: The Case of Aspect in English and Standard Arabic

How student translators, with little or no grammatical input, face problematic grammatical source text units in translating aspect into English and Arabic remains largely under-researched. While Arabic is a highly aspectualizing language, aspect as a grammatical operation is totally absent from grammar textbooks and courses. To Arab undergraduate students in general, categories such as aspect, modality, and mood are extremely opaque, as they do not even have clear equivalents in Arabic grammar. What adds to such a student’s dilemma is that aspectual formal markers, like the so-called English progressive form, are ineffectively defined by direct assignment of meaning to meaningless categories and often approached out of context. Based on the results of classwork with student translators, this paper highlights the need to update pedagogical grammar in order to reflect both the working of language in natural contexts and the epistemic changes in post-structuralist linguistics. A contrastive corpus-based grammar of English and Arabic tailored to the needs of prospective translators is a pedagogical requirement. At the core of the translation process, contrastivity would enable students to gain enriching insight into the working of natural languages beyond the static binaries of conventional grammars, and enhance their interlingual competence and metalinguistic awareness.