Translating Punctuation Marks between Arabic and English

Translation is a vast world in which we find divergent theories tugged between the shape of the text and its essence. However, each party has its arguments to progress the translation practice and improve the translated text to match the original one with all its linguistic and extra-linguistic details in its new receiving language. But we note that both parties have neglected the translation of the smallest part of the text, which is punctuation marks, even though the latter are a basic building block in clarifying meanings, dividing ideas and assigning translation units before proceeding with the translation process. Thus, we present this study, which is based on a contrastive approach, as a window to attract the attention of translators to these punctuation marks and their importance before and during the translation process to reduce the mistakes of shape and meaning in the same time and preserve the characteristics of the original text.