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the Lord's prayer to emphasize the trinitarian concept of God which
is less structurally emphasized in the English original. Nida
cites several Biblical co-ordinate phrases to exemplify the
semantic injustice done to them if translated word-for-word in
other languages.
Languages have their own established systems of clausal
structure, typology, and combination. Miscorrespondences arise
when the translator fails to identify the clausal pattern, the
significance of the order of component parts, and the grammatical
links which hold the components of the clause structure together.
The major sentence pattern in Arabic and English, for instance, is
the subject-predicate type • of construction, but within this type
other patterns do exist. The subject-verb-object pattern in
English is reversed in Arabic into verb-subject-object. Moreover,
transitive verbs in Arabic, 1\se-thelr-c-otmrterp-ar--tsin
English, take one object or more. Prepositional objects in English
are non-existent in Arabic. They belong to a specific grammatical
category in which the preposition functions as a denominator of a
spatial relationship between two subsequent objects. Direct and
indirect objects in Arabic are not situated in proximity to the
preceding verb as it is the case in English. In Arabic, a direct
object may succeed an indirect object and will thus be located at a
relative distance from the verb. Misplacement of objects (direct
and/or indirect) in the receptor langauge is bound to create
semantic incongruence. Good translators should, before
accomplishing an acceptable work, ascertain the existence of a
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