Genre as linguistic coding of social occasions and the translation of their textual/intertextual potential with reference to English and Arabic

The current research deals with the notion of genre and introduces the notion of genrelet as a special kind of genre which operates under structural and language constraints,, and which involves more specific textual, participatory and social roles of participants than a genre does. It is argued that there exists a highly motivated kind of genre via intertextuality where the language user hijacks some generic elements from one genre and infiltrates them *into another different genre in an attempt to achieve a subtle argument and to relay an attitude. This intertextual operation involves the three dimensions of context (register, pragmatics, semiotics) and entails changes inflicted on the original social occasion, the attitude of the original text producer, the position of the sign, the function of the original genre, and the textual, participatory and/or social roles of the original participants. The research attempts to handle the issue from an English/Arabic translation point of view since the intertextual operation is considered one of the most problematic cases a translator would face

The empirical status of text, discourse and genre in the training of English/Arabic translators

Abstract unavailable please refer to PD

Arabic Text Classification Framework Based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation

In this paper, we present a new algorithm based on the LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and the Support Vector Machine (SVM) used in the classification of Arabic texts.Current research usually adopts Vector Space Model to represent documents in Text Classification applications. In this way, document is coded as a vector of words; n-grams. These features cannot indicate semantic or textual content; it results in huge feature space and semantic loss. The proposed model in this work adopts a “topics” sampled by LDA model as text features. It effectively avoids the above problems. We extracted significant themes (topics) of all texts, each theme is described by a particular distribution of descriptors, then each text is represented on the vectors of these topics. Experiments are conducted using an in-house corpus of Arabic texts. Precision, recall and F-measure are used to quantify categorization effectiveness. The results show that the proposed LDA-SVM algorithm is able to achieve high effectiveness for Arabic text classification task (Macro-averaged F1 88.1% and Micro-averaged F1 91.4%)

Metaphor in (Arabic-into-English) translation with specific reference to metaphorical concepts and expressions in political discourse

Cognitive linguistics scholars argue that metaphor is fundamentally a conceptual process of mapping one domain of experience onto another domain. The study of metaphor in the context of Translation Studies has not, unfortunately, kept pace with the discoveries about the nature and role of metaphor in the cognitive sciences. This study aims primarily to fill part of this gap of knowledge. Specifically, the thesis is an attempt to explore some implications of the conceptual theory of metaphor for translation. Because the study of metaphor in translation is also based on views about the nature of translation, the thesis first presents a general overview of the discipline of Translation Studies, describing the major models of translation. The study (in Chapter Two) then discusses the major traditional theories of metaphor (comparison, substitution and interaction theories) and shows how the ideas of those theories were adopted in specific translation studies of metaphor. After that, the study presents a detailed account of the conceptual theory of metaphor and some hypothetical implications for the study of metaphor in translation from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. The data and methodology are presented in Chapter Four. A novel classification of conceptual metaphor is presented which distinguishes between different source domains of conceptual metaphors: physical, human-life and intertextual. It is suggested that each source domain places different demands on translators. The major sources of the data for this study are (1) the translations done by the Foreign Broadcasting Information Service (FBIS), which is a translation service of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United Sates of America, of a number of speeches by the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein during the Gulf Crisis (1990-1991) and (2) official (governmental) Omani translations of National Day speeches of Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman

Typing yourself healthy: Introduction to the special issue on language and health online

This chapter functions as an introduction to the special issue on Language and Health Online, which features 10 original research papers. It reviews the results of the papers and the joint emerging themes: the impact of technical and social affordances of computer-mediated interaction; discovering an emic perspective of health issues, uncovering health ideologies, and the theme of patient empowerment; the construction of identities, the construction of shared experiences, and the use of narratives. The diverse methodologies that are employed are introduced and a case is made for an open, versatile and mixed methodology when researching language and health online

Narratives of Selfhood: A Study of the Arabic Biographical Novel, 1967- 2010

Scholarship on the Arabic novel often approaches it in light of questions of national consciousness, identity formation and contact with the West. This study relates the traditional fictional narrative of individual self-development found in biographical subgenres of the novel such as the Bildungsroman, autobiographical and confessional novels with these scholarly enterprises. It explores how biographical forms, as found in the post-1967 Arabic novel, have reflected an individualistic worldview that began as a reaction to certain collectivist ideas inherited from a previous generations of writers and intellectuals. The individualism of biographical forms is shown to be a reaction to the literary conventions associated with the themes of national identity and the Western encounter. The New Sensibility movement that evolved during the period that the study covers is analysed in relation to various Arabic texts from eight countries. Theories of intertextuality provide the interpretive tools to discuss the links between those novels and the changes in genres over time. Gérard Genette’s concept of hypertextuality is one of such tools used to analyse the relationship between the contemporary texts and their predecessors, and Bakhtin’s ideas on utterances and speech genres allow me to interpret the implied writers’ views on the values associated with the literary convention in which they are participating. I use three prototypical narratives to summarise the elements of the established literary conventions and the presuppositions of the writers and readers. The study focuses on two recurrent themes in the contemporary biographical novel; political activism and immigration. It shows how these two topics were developed literary codes that contemporary writers gave new significations. In prototypical narratives, they were literary vehicles for imagining a unified community, and in the late twentieth century they transformed into narratives of self-discovery and individualistic emphasis on uniqueness and agency. By focusing on certain attributes of the biographical form, such as the spontaneous desire of the individual and the persistent motif of the double, I show how this particular subgenre of the novel was used to disturb the collectivist ideologies and stable speech genres that had become prevalent by the latter half of the twentieth century

Multilingual and intercultural communication in and beyond the UK asylum process: a linguistic ethnographic case study of legal advice-giving across cultural and linguistic borders

This thesis investigates how asylum applicants and refugees in the UK, and legal professionals, communicate multilingually and interculturally within legal advice meetings concerning the processes of applying for asylum and for refugee family reunion. The thesis addresses the important question of how English-speaking immigration legal advisors negotiate understanding with clients from a range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds in order to deliver crucial legal advice and support. Adopting a critical social constructionist perspective on language, culture, and communication, the thesis explores how a diverse range of linguistic, languacultural and discursive resources are employed to communicate within legal advice-giving. The thesis offers an in-depth analysis of legal-lay communication in the co-operative professional mediation setting of legal advice, contrasting with, and complementing, the existing literature on multilingual and intercultural communication in institutional gatekeeping contexts. The research takes a linguistic ethnographic case study approach, applying methodological perspectives on researching multilingually and theoretical perspectives from institutional ethnography. It combines ethnographic fieldwork within an advice service offering asylum and refugee legal advice with linguistic analysis of observations and audio recordings of advice meeting interactions.  The linguistic analysis combines the micro-analytic tools of interactional sociolinguistics with a communicative activity type analysis of the discursive structuring of legal advice interactions, and a transcontextual analysis of the range of texts entering into the interaction. The thesis demonstrates how refugee and asylum legal advice interactions are contextually framed by legal institutional intertextual hierarchies, which constrain, but also provide resources for, the purposeful communication taking place. It also demonstrates how a flexibly applied communicative activity type structure functions as a discursive tool to support intercultural communication. The thesis contributes to the fields of intercultural communication studies and professional and legal communication studies, and responds to broader issues of language and social justice, and the linguistic accessibility of institutions

РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЯ СЕМАНТИКИ НЕВЫРАЗИМОГО В РАЗНЫХ ЯЗЫКАХ

РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЯ СЕМАНТИКИ НЕВЫРАЗИМОГО В РАЗНЫХ ЯЗЫКАХ Аннотация Показано кластерное бытование семантики невыразимого в прозопографии и шире, - в художественном тексте. К специфике средств прозопографии отнесены: план выражения семантики невыразимого, лексемы-интернационализмы. Выявлена значительная частотность сопряженного сосуществования семантики невыразимого, средств прозопографии с языковыми единицами теистической семантики. Предложен термин «калейдоскоп номинаций, различных по грамматической категории рода» как методологическая основа анализа прозопографии, показана верифицирующая сила этого термина. Ключевые слова: функционально-семантическая категория, невыразимое, сопоставительный анализ, план выражения, стилистический приём, прозопография, дескрипция вымышленного существа, дескриптивная лексика, отрицательные определения, анализ художественного текста, номинативная цепочка, бурлеск, теистическая семантика. REPRESENTATION OF SEMANTICS OF INEXPRESSIBLE IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES Abstract The cluster existing of semantics of inexpressible in prosoprography and more widely, - in the literary text is shown in the article. The plan of inexpressible semantics expression, international words are referred to specific features of prosoprography means. The immense frequency of the adjacent coexistence of semantics of inexpressible, prosoprography means with the language units of theistic semantics is revealed. The term "kaleidoscope of nominations, various on grammatical gender category" as a methodological basis of the prosoprography analysis is offered, the verifying force of this term is shown