Markedness Theory in the Holy Bible with Reference to English, Syriac and Arabic Translations

Markedness is a very comprehensive term which can be used in any discipline like phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, social sciences, among many other disciplines. As for linguistics, it means the way words, phrases, are changed, added, deleted or foregrounded, mid-grounded and backgrounded. All these changes take place in an accordance with the intentionality of the speaker whenever a certain idea should be confirmed. This research paper studies the use of “markedness theory “ in three translated versions of ten verses of the holy Bible ,namely (1) English,(2) Syriac and (3) Arabic. The main problem is that the study does not use the source language text since it is not available ; therefore, a contrastive study will be conducted to see to what extent translators used the markedness theory in their renderings. This study hypothesizes that: (1) the confirmed messages or ideas are marked, and (2) the translators are aware of the marked elements. The main conclusions the study arrived at are: (1)the three versions: English, Syriac and Arabic were the output of communicative translations in that structurally speaking differences among the three versions are recognizable, and (2) confirmation of certain key-words which convey the gist of the verse has been marked and considered by the translators mainly by foregrounding and sometimes by midgrounding and backgrounding.