The Negation System In Arabic: An Issue For Translation

Résumé: Acquired in a natural manner in the early stages of language acquisition, negation is an important syntactic feature that pervades everyday communication in all languages. To give affirmative declaratives a negative sense, Arabic includes a rich set of negating structures, while in English and French, the system is far more simple as it only needs the insertion of a few particles such as ‘not’ , ‘no’, ‘neither’ in the former, and ‘ne…pas’, ‘nul’ and ‘ni’ in the latter. On the basis of data drawn from Modern Standard Arabic, the present article highlights the issues met in the use of the various negation structures and the resulting ambiguity in their translation from and towards Arabic. The issue particularly addresses Machine Translation as it is faced with great difficulties in obtaining appropriate translations if not human-assisted. The paper will also consider a few negating forms used in Colloquial Arabic, in particular to show how the system as a whole is simplified as in the case of Algerian Arabic.

Publié dans la revue: Revue Maghrébine des Langues