Translating Terminology in Business Annual Reports (English-Arabic)

Business annual reports are financial statements that contain key information about a company’s activities. The reports are distributed to interested parties (e.g. stockholders, creditors, financial analysts and customers) to satisfy their information requirements. In Oman, annual business reports are produced in English and translated into Arabic in order to provide Arab readers with vital information about the companies’ operations and their financial positions. This article analyzes lexical variations, i.e. financial and business terminologies in both English and Arabic versions of the annual reports. A comparison between the English and Arabic profiles of the reports found that the business terms, e.g. ‘currents assets’, ‘asset impairment’ and ‘changes in equity’ showed less variation than others that occurred more dominantly in earlier Arabic translations. This article contributes to the discipline of Translation Studies (TS) by investigating lexical variations of business terms within sociocultural and ideological contexts in Oman. It attempts to answer the following question, ‘with respect to business and financial terms, do the Arabic versions of the annual reports reflect the notion of standardization over the course of time in specific industrial domains?’ Qualitative methods are applied to compare, describe, and analyze the textual profiles of the two versions of the reports. It concludes that the Arabic business and financial terms have become more widely established over the course of time, thus reflecting the notion of standardization. Finally, this article suggests to integrate textual analysis with sociological input to have more insight into translation agents

Application of membrane distillation for the treatment of oil field produced water

Direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) was investigated for the treatment of oil-field produced water using a hydrophobic polypropylene (PP) membrane with 0.2 mu m pore size. The DCMD performance was studied under different feed temperatures ranged from 40 degrees C to 80 degrees C while the cooling temperature was maintained at 23 degrees C. Increasing the feed water temperature resulted in a higher permeate water flux. Stable and reliable DCMD membrane performance was observed for all used membranes. The obtained results indicated the great potential of DCMD to treat hypersaline oil-field produced water with an overall rejection of salts higher than 99.9% and that of total organic carbon (TOC) greater than 93.3%. This was due to the presence of volatile organic compounds in oil-field water. Pre-treatment of produced water using 0.45 mu m filter did not show much effect on the DCMD performance. A slight gradual reduction of the permeate flux was observed due to fouling phenomenon. A simple washing the membrane with de-ionized water was found to be an effective method for cleaning the membrane and restoring the permeate flux indicating the absence of irreversible fouling