Abstract
Register shift is often inevitable in translation, particularly, between languages that are profoundly different as English and Arabic. The question, however, is what kind of shift? To find out markers of register shift in students’ translations, a summary of the biography of Lady Jane Digby published in Hello magazine on 7th February 2006 was given to 12 MA students in the Translating Literary and Media Texts course at the Academy of Graduate Studies, Tripoli, Libya, to translate into Arabic. Adopting House’s model of translation quality assessment students’ translations were evaluated to find out to what extent “culture filter factors” were active in translating ST to TT to optimize comprehension. The aim is also to find out how they dealt with such factors in performing the translation task whether they geared towards an overt or covert approach hoping to reach conclusions of the reasons behind their choice of approach. Analysis of students’ translations shows a clear register shift in translating both phases of Lady Digby’s biography at the level of lexical items and structure. Though the theme of the story remains the same throughout the article focusing on Lady Digby’s scandalous love life, her marriages to and love affairs with Counts and Kings in Europe, and later her romantic involvement with a married Bedouin Syrian prince twenty or more years her junior in the Middle East, in their translations, students dealt with the European phase of her life differently to that in the Middle East.