A Linguistic Analysis of Translation Shifts between English and Arabic in UN News Texts: A Catfordian Approach

This study examines the linguistic shifts that occur in the process of translating United Nations news texts between English and Arabic. Drawing upon Catford's (1965) theory of translation shifts, it classifies and analyses structural and semantic variations in a selected corpus of audiovisual news items translated between the two languages. The analysis identifies level shifts, structure shifts, class shifts, unit shifts, intra-system shifts, and semantic shifts. Results show that structure and tense shifts are the most recurrent due to the deep grammatical contrasts between Arabic and English. Although the translations deviate from the form of the source text, they maintain meaning and communicative function, demonstrating that equivalence in translation is achieved through contextual and functional adaptation rather than formal correspondence.