| المستخلص: |
Translation Studies has lately witnessed considerable progress both in quality and quantity. The focus in such studies has shifted from primarily comparing translations with their source texts to systematically investigating the nature of translated texts as such. During the last decade, in particular, the use of large-scale electronic corpora for the study of translations in many languages has led to the discovery of several linguistic characteristics which are common in translated texts regardless of the source and target languages involved. Such general features have been called 'tendencies', 'regularities', 'laws' or even ’universals' by different translation scholars.. The present paper aims at investigating, in the context of Arabic translated texts, the validity of two hypotheses concerning the specificity of translational language in general. The two postulated translation 'universals' to be tested are; (a) the Repetition Avoidance Hypothesis, and (b) the Explicitation Hypothesis, The first refers to the strategies of either deleting lexical repetitions of the source text (ST) in translations, or rewording such repeated lexical items. The second translational regularity is usually manifested in the translators' practice of amplifying the target text (TT) through, for example, using explicit sentence connectors, or filling in ellipsis, or adding explanatory background information. Evidence from the analysis and comparison of the 40 English-Arabic and Arabic-English translated text fragments reported in the body of the paper, in addition to many more instances detected in the data analysis as a whole, seems to verify the validity of the above two hypotheses. The analyzed translations have been shown to exhibit linguistic features which are representative of the two phenomena: 'repetition avoidance' as well as 'explicitation'.
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