Translating Grammatical Gender in English–Arabic Literary Contexts: A Mixed-Methods Study of Student Performance

Abstract

This study investigates the translation of gender from English into Arabic, focusing on the performance of senior-level translation students in a literary context. Building on previous research on verbal and adjectival translation, the article adopts a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative frequency analysis with qualitative examination of error types. The corpus consists of selected passages from Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley, translated into Modern Standard Arabic by student translators. Gender-related renderings are classified as similar, different or unattempted in order to assess both accuracy and omission. The findings indicate that while gender is generally handled correctly at the lexical level, significant difficulties arise in maintaining agreement within phrases and clauses, particularly in cases involving inanimate or abstract nouns and structurally complex constructions. The study highlights the impact of grammatical asymmetry between English and Arabic on translation performance and underscores the need for more systematic instruction in contrastive grammar and contextual analysis. It contributes to a more nuanced understanding of gender as a key factor in English–Arabic literary translation and provides implications for translator training.