Translation Assessment of the Conditional Sentences in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” Story by Dostoevsky

“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” is a short story written by Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1877. This story is full of deep meanings about love, misery, responsibility and selfishness, and it is full of various grammatical structures. Due to its importance as an emotional story and as a literary text, it has been analyzed by a number of critics and researchers. Similarly, the translation is as important as its language, and it needs to be assessed systematically. The significance of the study is to identify whether the translator is familiar with the structure of Arabic conditional sentences and that he translates the English ones accurately. The problem is that there are several tenses expressed through the conditional cases in English which need to be translated accurately. This paper aims to analyze the Arabic translation of English conditional sentences in this story to distinguish between the real conditional situation used by the protagonist, who is suffering from psychological conflicts, and the other two hypothetical conditional situations. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are used to analyze the collected data. It has been concluded that the translator has succeeded in translating most of the conditional sentences into Arabic. Nonetheless, he could not translate the conditional particle “if” properly.