Abstract This study uses relevance theory as an insightful heuristic model for translation quality assessment. As translation inherently involves communicating across contextual boundaries, the ...notion of relevance optimization continues to be a fruitful approach for research and practice. This investigation illuminates idioms as culturally embedded linguistic conventions, semantically abstruse, yet structurally crystallized. Idioms accrue fixed meanings within a speech community rather than by compositing constituent denotations. Classical Arabic poetry extensively harnesses idioms, not as ornamental substitutes for literal statements, but as intensive versions thereof. Losing idioms risks muting tonal intensity. By examining an Arabic verse exemplifying two idioms, and assessing thirteen English and French translations, this study reveals that an effective idiom translation requires looking beyond lexical equivalence. Rather, contextually unraveling connotative lexicons and reconstituting the idiom to achieve equivalent effects and optimal relevance is key. Thereby, successful idiom translation is defined not by formal correspondence, but by conveying implicated meanings and intended impacts. This work elucidates idiom translatability through an interdisciplinary relevance prism, advancing theory and equipping practitioners to navigate the interlingual labyrinth.
Abstract
This paper investigates the hermeneutic processes involved in translating instances of imagery in Arabic poetry into English across a period ranging between 1789 and 1993. It examines ten ...translations of two verse lines from Labīd’s
Mu’allaqa
. The paper does not aim to determine whether a given translation is correct—its purpose is, rather, to use translational hermeneutics as a key analytical tool to identify which translation products may be considered acceptable within the scope of this theory. Translational hermeneutics conceives of translation as re-formulation and, hence, re-creation. The notion of identity is minimised, in translational hermeneutics as well as in this study, by investigating how a source text’s aesthetic message can assume a different form when translated. The assessment of different translations in this paper’s case study demonstrates that translating responsibly is, first and foremost, translating responsively.
In a collaboration between student translators and teachers, they worked to produce Arabic translations of the canonical poems by the Korean poet, Yoon Dong-Joo. In this retrospective study, the ...revisions to the student translations are classified, explained and justified. Both the translation process and translation product are scrutinized in order to assess the students’ work and to provide an understanding of the translation journey, the aim of which was to produce a poetic work in Arabic that aspires to echo the original text.
This paper investigates problems surrounding translating and/or transliterating, examines a case study, and discusses how a poet/lover uses different appellations to purposefully address his beloved, ...which include the beloved's actual name and three different heteronyms that are examples of metonymy. The repetitions of the actual name and metonymic processing are functionally effective in expressing the poet's feelings. As proper names, metonymic appellations possess the power of clarification, which not only establishes meaning-making but also the speaker's appeal and perspective, thus contributing nuance and salience. By conducting a comparative critical assessment of a corpus consisting of French and English translations, this study demonstrates how cultural and pragmatic losses are incurred in the process of conveying the verbal metonymic signs of the original culture to a different culture. The outcome is a misinterpretation of the source text's literariness and its pragmatic forces. As this study confirms, proper names are more than deictic symbols, and they also bear functional communicative clues that determine specific translation techniques through which they can travel.
Languages possess different tools to intensify speech overtones. While the resulting effect is semantic, grammatical, phonological, or lexical devices may be used. Words can be motivated in three ...ways: phonetically, morphologically, and semantically. Phonological motivation is part of the fabric of classical poetry. This study is concerned with the language used in Arabic poetry, which is made sufficiently sonorant to reflect the psyche and emotional status of the poet through the intensification of speech overtones. When translated into Western languages, the speech overtones of this poetry are not always evident. This study adopts the mechanisms of optimality theory, a cognitive linguistic approach. The mechanisms of this theory are adapted into assessment tools that can be used to evaluate the acoustic overtones of translations from classical Arabic poetry into English and French. The study uses a comparative strategy to assess a corpus of 13 French and English translations of a sample verse from classical Arabic poetry.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Style is the kernel of literariness. This study examines the translatability of pleonasm, a form of redundancy considered a standard rhetorical device in Arabic but usually avoided in Western ...languages. The study evaluates and compares English and French translations of a pleonastic Arabic verse line. An acceptable translation of this verse should provide an affective-stylistic equivalent that will capture and convey the same appeal as the source text with a similar degree of literariness, not just a direct linguistic equivalent. This research asserts that a translator usually works within their own translation aesthetics, developed within their cultural and disciplinary traditions of literary and translational aesthetics and their idiosyncratic ideas about or interpretation of the source text.
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FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, UL, UM, UPUK
Despite its originality, Tennyson's poem ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842) shares considerable characteristics with the pre-Islamic Arabic poems the
Mu‘allaqāt
, namely those composed by Imru’ al-Qays and ...‘Antara. The similarities include length, rhyme, metre, genre, themes and appeal, which this article compares in order to show that Tennyson adapts these source text resources to the concerns and subject matter of his own poem, and not for the purpose of translating the
Mu‘allaqāt
. It follows that ‘Locksley Hall’ needs to be studied in modern scholarship not only as a poem that reflects some aspects of Tennyson's biography and poetic craft, but also as an imitation of other poetry. This article analyses the details that unveil the imitative strategy Tennyson adopts in ‘Locksley Hall’. In so doing, it posits that ‘imitation’ is better suited than ‘intertextuality’ as a conceptual tool for articulating the links between ‘Locksley Hall’ and the
Mu‘allaqāt
. Furthermore, in contrast to previous critical studies that refer to the influence on Tennyson of the
Mu‘allaqa
of Imru’ al-Qays, this article argues that Tennyson combines two
Mu‘allaqāt
as source materials for his own poem.
This article tests the workability of the principle of relevance at the heart of relevance theory by evaluating a corpus of eighteen English and French translations of verse 33 of the Mu‘allaqa of ...Imru’ al-Qays. This verse embodies a conventional metaphor reflecting a stereotyped image in Arabic poetry, which communicates its ground to the source language (SL) reader by means of inference. The verse challenges the translator to render the metaphor into an equivalent trope and to reflect the ground of the comparison, either by inference or by reference. By comparing the translations in the corpus to the source text (ST) and to each other, this study draws conclusions as to the translatability of a conventional metaphor. Chronology and mode of discourse are taken into account in the evaluation process so as to categorize the translations and the shifts exercised in them. This evaluative yardstick is used to measure resemblance and relevance by taking into account both the ST and the target text (TT) contexts
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