Argumentum, Vol. 21 (2025), pp. 117–141.

Translating Some English Collective Nouns into Arabic: A Case Study of Palestinian Students’ Translations

Mahmoud S. S. Fannouna

    Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Institute of Intercultural Linguistics

    mahmoudfan@student.elte.hu

DOI: 10.34103/ARGUMENTUM/2025/9

Abstract

This paper seeks to unravel the intricacies involved when translating English collective nouns into Arabic by Palestinian undergraduate translation students. In English, collective nouns like government, jury, and committee allow both singular and plural verb agreement depending on notional or grammatical concord. On the other hand, Arabic places strict grammatical concord on collective nouns by considering them as singular entities despite their semantic plurality. Hence, this cross-linguistic difference poses translation and pedagogical concerns for transla­tors. For the purpose of this study, a structured questionnaire was distributed to 30 students of different academic levels at Al-Najah University. The questionnaire consists of demographic questions, ten English to Arabic translation tasks involving collective nouns, and reflective questions regarding students’ strategies and their perceptions about the difficulties involved. The data was analyzed thematically and demonstrated that although most students followed Arabic grammatical norms and used singular verb agreement, a minority resorted to notional translation using plural subjects (e.g., members of the committee) together with a plural verb agreement. However, difficulties that arise for students involve the singular and plural agreement, and lexical gaps. Senior students as well as students who had prior exposure to political texts tended to have more syntactic awareness and accuracy. Based on the findings of this paper, explicit instruction is needed on collective noun behavior, and notional versus grammatical agreement. In concordance with these linguistic aspects, this study contributes to translation pedagogy by focusing on context-sensitive equivalence and grammatical awareness in dealing with collective noun constructions between two typologically different languages.

Keywords: Collective nouns, grammatical concord, notional agreement, English-Arabic translation, translation pedagogy

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