English abstract
This research is based on the use of Halliday's notion of Transitivity System which is a part of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as a framework in translation. To Halliday, Transitivity is "a system of the clause, affecting not only the verb serving as Process, but also Participants and Circumstances." (Halliday & Mathiessen, 2004, p. 181). Halliday describes three basic elements in Transitivity System: Process, Participants, and Circumstances. The process can be defined by verbal structure, Participants by nominal structure, and Circumstances by adverbs and prepositions.
This thesis tries to show the extent of change in the source text (ST) meaning when using different representation of clause based on Transitivity System. To do so, a corpus-based analysis will be applied to analyze English texts and their Arabic translations using Transitivity System. The analysis will include the basic elements of Transitivity System: Process, Participants, and Circumstances.
The analysis of data was based on a qualitative descriptive method. Data were taken randomly from 64 news articles and sentences segmented into single clauses. Each clause was presented with its translation and analysis for its Process, Participants, and Circumstances. The different representation of Transitivity System of the clause in ST and target text (TT), and its effect on meaning were discussed in the analysis chapter.
The thesis has found that in some cases, the different representation of Transitivity System of clauses in news articles has changed the ST meaning. It has also affected the accuracy of TT and changed the mental picture drawn by ST writer. Some of these changes have also affected the perspective of the writer.
In other cases, it seems that translators had to do some adjustments to the ST in order to meet the linguistic norms of the target language (TL) and as a result, the Transitivity System of the TL has been changed.
