Accuracy and neutrality in the translation process

The primary concern rests with the notion that the universal message of the Qur'an may not be efficiently and effectively transmitted throughout the world.

Journal of King Saud University-Languages and …, 2011

The concept of equivalence is believed to be a central issue in translation although its definition, relevance, and applicability within the field of translation theory have caused heated controversies. Several theories on the concept of equivalence have been elaborated within this field in the past fifty years.

Abstract: This article looks at the limitations that translators encounter in their quest to achieve equivalence in translation practice. Many research scholars in this field have brainstormed on the concept of equivalence and many of them tend to think that it is not a simple matter to try and establish the expected or required sameness between the source language and the target language. There are numerous challenges that translators are faced with in their effort to establish similarity or sameness between the source text and the target text. The debate surrounding the notion of equivalence started as early the 1950s, and ever since, the topic has not only been problematic but also controversial, with many arguing that no two languages in the whole world are absolutely identical in meaning. They further argue that equivalence can only be understood as a kind of likeness and not sameness. Consequently, numerous theories have emerged and have been expounded on the possibility of the source text and target text sharing some kind of approximation in meaning. This work has attempted to critically examine some of the limitations concerning the issue of equivalence in translation as propagated by a number of specialists in the field of translation theories. This article also stresses the fact every translator is likely to face these challenges, as they endeavour to convey the same message from the source language to the target language.

The paper aimed to investigate the role of translator's religious ideology on his/her translation of the Nobel Quran by focusing on English translations of four verses from Surah An-Nisa (Women), Surah Al-Ahzab (The Confederates) and Surah An-Nur (Light) which are mostly referred to with the aim of imagining Islam as a religion that oppresses women and abuses their rights. To this end, four English translations of the Nobel Quran by four translators from Muslim, Christian and Jewish backgrounds, with different ideologies, were selected as the corpus of this study. The research applied Farahzad's model of translation criticism (Based on Fairclough's approach to CDA) as the theoretical framework of this paper. Based on this framework, English translations of selected verses were compared with their original versions at the textual level and paratextual level. The result of this study demonstrated that it is difficult to conclude that there is relationship between translator's religious ideology and his/her translation of Quran.

Journal of Universal Language

This article focuses on cultural translation, especially addressing the issue of cultural inequivalences or losses occurring in the translation of Arabic literary texts. The aim of this study is to investigate the translation strategies that led to cultural losses and to emphasize the important role of the translator as a cultural insider. The corpus is based on a collection of Arabic short stories written by Youssef Idris (1991). In order to illustrate cultural aspects in literature, we analyze figurative language (metaphors, idiomatic expressions, proverbs) in two texts: Arabic (the source text) and English (the target text). We argue that figurative language and cultural terms are unfamiliar and so are marked to the target reader on the grounds of the unmarked and should be looked at from the perspective of a cultural insider. The data is analyzed within Pike's (1954) etic-emic approach to translation. The analysis has shown that translation of the source text was communicatively successful. However, it failed to represent the culture-bound and emotionally charged words which represent the implicit/emic level of the source text. The translator has failed to complete the cycle of etic-emic-etic, and so remained an outsider to both the source and target texts. The study * This article is based on a 2004 PhD dissertation. 8 Translation and Cultural Equivalence: A Study of Translation Losses concludes with the implication that a translator has to assume the role of a cultural insider for both texts in order to render a culturally more faithful translation.

English Language Teaching, 2016

Due to differences across languages, meanings and concepts vary across different languages, too. The most obvious points of difference between languages appear in their literature and their culture-specific items (CSIs), which lead to complexities when transferring meanings and concepts from one language into another. To overcome the complexities arisen from the distinction between languages in the process of translation, translation scholars have proposed different strategies. Newmark's proposed taxonomy for translating CSIs is the framework for achieving this study. So, after adopting CSIs with Newmark's (1988) 5 proposed domains of CSIs, we sought to find his proposed translation strategies applied in the English translation of Jalal Al-Ahmad's By the Pen by Ghanoonparvar (1988) and to evaluate the frequency of each in order to determine which strategy could help the most in translating CSIs. To do so, first, both the source language text and its translation were studied; then, the translation strategies applied were found. Having found the strategies as the sources of the data, they were arranged and analyzed. Results showed that functional equivalent was the most frequently used strategy, and modulation and paraphrase were the least frequently used ones. Findings have pedagogical implications for translation students and literary translators.

, formerly professor of linguistics and translation in MMU, Huddersfield University, and a number of several Middle East universities, currently postgraduate translation studies at Effat University. 2 Translation & interpreting studies, formerly visiting professor at Bologna university, Italy and currently postgraduate translation studies at Effat University. ABSTRACT: This study is framed within a competence-oriented model which provides the target text (TT) receiver with communicative clues. These clues allow inference to be optimally captured. Hence, this approach looks at translation as an example of communication mainly based on the cost and effect model of inferencing and interpretations. Strategies adopted in this paper are determined by context-specific consideration of relevance, with special reference to cultural aspects. Applied to translation, one of the most appropriate strategies is to reproduce the cognitive effect intended by the source text (ST) communicator with the lowest possible effort on the part of the TT receiver. This study concludes that when there is a lack of isomorphism or symmetry between the cultural contents of the two languages, the translator will have to opt for content-cognitive effect or cultural transplantation. The translator would have to assess the relevance of content and form in a specific context in order to achieve the same effect in the TT. It has been emphasized, however, that translation as a special instance of human communication leads to the conclusion that various methods may be justified in their own right, if we take into consideration the differences in the text-types, the intention of the author, readership, and the purpose of translation. In a nutshell, however, translation remains a craft which requires not just training and skill but also continually renewed linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge, considerable imagination as well as intelligence and common sense, and most of all talent.

This paper sheds light on the impediments of translation and on the strategies that should be followed for clarity of intent. It focuses on basic prospects of linguistic, lexical, and cultural problems. The paper tackles the ambiguity some new learners might fall with during translation. It exposes models of Arabic sentences, expressions and proverbs to English and back for a precise translation. The objective of this work is to avoid some peculiarities which are dealt with as defects in both academic and non-academic fields of translation. This paper is, therefore, an attempt to expound these problems so the translator can aware of the lacunae which might go unseen in the process of translation. It is also to seek which meaning is possibly intended by the writer based on, not a customary translation, however, diversity of times and attitudes as well. To ease the function to the foreign speakers and to make this work more attainable, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions are considered whenever necessary.

International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies

Any translation practice is intended to produce a text which is equivalent in meaning with its source text. However, to arrive at such equivalence is not an easy task due to a number of differences between the source language and the target language. Therefore, finding the right equivalence is a problem often encountered by translators, especially student translators. Suggested by such problem, a study on equivalence problems and possible strategies to solve the problems is obviously necessary. This article aims at finding out the problems of equivalence encountered and the strategies to solve such problems applied by student translators in translating a historical recount text. This is a descriptive study taking 10 student translators as the participants who were asked to translate a historical recount text from English into bahasa Indonesia. The data were collected using Translog that recorded all the translation process done by the student translators. The results of the study we...

Over decades, there used to be a number of studies on Legal translation since it was one of the most challenging issues for translators and it still a critical and authoritative translation produced by legal bodies. Actually, translating legal texts might raise some problems in translation pertaining to the differences between the Source and Target Texts. Thus, it can result in a certain amount of ambiguity with respect to the legal texts, as it belongs to people‟s beliefs and cultures. This study investigates the quality of the translated text from Arabic into English. Hence, the focus is on the changes of the message in the translation process that is attributable to functional & verbal equivalence in Arabic and English as well. The study will rely on Baker‟s theory (1992) to examine whether the semantic changes affect the quality of the translated message in terms of equivalence, along with Newmark methods (1988) in translation. The study will analyse as well five different forms of marriage contracts translated by different native translators in the Arabic as a source language and their correspondence into English as a target language, in order to identify the cultural and linguistic equivalence by using functional comparisons between the Arabic and English legal systems.