When Translators Juggle: The Translator’s Latitude in Translating Tenses

Many scholars contend that technical language is rigid in its style such as Witte (1985), Long (2003). This entails that the latitude of the translator is low most of the time. This paper questions this contention in a genre of language which is characterized by being standing on the border of technical and expressive language as termed business and economic language. Methods: The researchers explore the translator’s latitude by analyzing two websites that offer economic texts translated into Arabic and compared between the choices made by the translators to convey the semantic nuances of tenses and aspect used in the business and economic genre. Following Halliday and Hassan’s (1967) theory of discourse analysis, the researcher drew a purposive sample, including the three tenses and their multiple aspectual translations to meet the study objective. Results: The paper found that different choices were made by the translators in both websites where some of the nuances were not conveyed like the translation of the present perfect and some were expressed through other linguistic devices, mostly lexes. Grammar and semantics go hand in hand to build meanings through any language systems. Conclusion: This paper draws the lines to the features of the economic language which pours in the benefit of linguists and translators alike to converge meanings transferred from remote languages as is the case with English and Arabic.