Syntactic classes of the Arabic passive participle: And how they should be rendered into English

The main concern of this article is to provide an analysis of the syntactic classes of Arabic passive participle forms and discuss their translations based on a comparative study of two English Quranic translations by Ali (1934) and Pickthall (1930). The study attempts to answer two questions: (a) Should we translate the Arabic passive participle into an English nominal, verbal, adjectival or adverbial? and (b) What are the factors that determine the choice of one translation or the other? So, it compares the two translations to analyze the different English translations of the Arabic passive participle. A corpus of 350 sentences has been randomly selected from the source text, together with their 700 translations in the target texts. The two translations of all the sentences are compared and analyzed in terms of syntactic and semantic features. The various English translations of the Arabic passive participle forms are presented with a count of the examples representing them in the corpus and their percentages. Then, the contextual reference of each translation is studied and accounted for.