Vermeer's skopos theory and its application to the Arabic translation of Miller's Death of a Salesman

The present study aimed at shedding some light on Vermeer's (1989) Skopos theory in translation as suggested by Vermeer along with the application of this theory to an English literary text taken from Miller's Death of A Salesman (1947) and its Arabic translation done by a Syrian Arab translator called Omar Jabak. Besides, the article will try to examine the weaknesses of Skopos theory in terms of its applicability to literary texts in particular. The researchers adopted the analytical descriptive approach in this small-scale qualitative study to prove the inapplicability of the Skopos theory principles to the above-mentioned English play and its Arabic translation. The research data and findings revealed that Vermeer's Skopos theory had somehow little applicability to translated literary works because literature and its translation, in general, and drama, in particular, have meaningful or 'skopos' in people's social, economic and political lives

Syntactic translation strategies for retaining parallelism in the Arabic translation of Moby Dick

The present study examines strategies for translating parallelism and factors in retaining parallelism in the Arabic translation of the novel of “Moby Dick”. Analysis is conducted on two sets of data taken from the English novel “Moby Dick” written by Melville in 1851 and its Arabic translation ‘Mūbī Dīk’ by ʻAbbās (1980). This qualitative research is guided by Chesterman’s (1997) syntactic strategy model, and contrastive analysis (CA) is also performed. The contrastive analysis is carried out using a coding procedure based on themes and taxonomies in the acquired data constructed by the researchers. The result shows that, based on Chesterman’s (1997) model, the translator of the above-mentioned novel employed three strategies, namely, literal translation, clause structure change and transposition to maintain parallelism in the Arabic translation of the English novel

The difficulty of translating collocations from Arabic into English encountered by a sample of Arab students

The present study aimed at exploring the difficulty that was encountered by a sample of Saudi undergraduate students when they translated collocations from Arabic into English. The researchers attempted to identify the reasons behind such a difficulty and find practical solutions to this difficulty. They followed an experimental descriptive method in the study. They also designed a quiz on collocations and administered it to the students as part of the requirements of a course the students were taking at that time. The quiz was given to 50 Saudi undergraduate students at the Department of English at Teachers College of King Saud University in the second semester of the academic year 20015. The quiz consisted of 15 Arabic sentences which apparently included collocations. The research data and findings revealed that the majority of the students could not translate collocations correctly because they adopted literal translation, used bilingual dictionaries and had very little knowledge of the concept of collocations in both languages. To help Arab students overcome this enormous difficulty, the researchers offered some recommendations and suggestions at the end of their study

Assessment of Arabic-English translation produced by Google Translate

There have been very few research studies conducted on the assessment of Arabic-English translation produced by online Google Translate according to an extensive review of the literature available on this topic to date. The current qualitative study seeks to assess some samples of Arabic-English translation done by Google Translate and measure their accuracy against model translations of these samples provided by Dickins, Hervey and Higgins (2017) to determine if this translation method can be followed or not. The researcher collected the data (texts) from a book entitled Thinking Arabic Translation (Dickins, et al., 2017), fed them into Google Translate and conducted an error analysis to assess the quality of translation produced by Google Translate. The error analysis showed that Google Translate made lexical and syntactic errors which affected the quality of translation and caused the meaning of the translations to be unintelligible. The findings of the study revealed that Google Translate cannot be used as a valid translation tool for Arabic-English translation and that human interference is greatly needed to produce accurate and effective translation. Further research on the assessment of Google Translate in Arabic-English translation is recommended to either support the findings of this study or challenge them

Linguistic and cultural difficulties in Arabic-English translation of sentences among Saudi undergraduates

There have been very few studies on the linguistic and cultural difficulties in Arabic-English translation encountered by Arab undergraduate students to date. The present study aims to explore the linguistic and cultural difficulties experienced by 50 Saudi undergraduate students when they translate Arabic sentences into English and the underlying reasons behind these difficulties along with the solutions to these difficulties. This study uses a qualitative approach and two data collection tools which are evaluation instruments and semi-structured interviews. It also uses Newmark’s (1998, 2011) and Dickins’et al (2017) theoretical views on translation from one’s mother tongue into a foreign language as its theoretical framework. The analysis of the data revealed eleven linguistic difficulties, reasons behind the linguistic difficulties, ways of overcoming these linguistic difficulties, three main cultural difficulties with ten subcategories and reasons for these cultural difficulties and ways of overcoming the cultural difficulties, which all represent the findings of the study. Some of the linguistic difficulties encountered by the Saudi undergraduate students include indirect questions, articles, direct questions, conditional sentences, interjections, prepositions and relative pronouns. Some of the underlying reasons for such difficulties are the students’ adherence to literal translation, the differences in the linguistic systems of Arabic and English, and the application of Arabic grammar rules to English translation. The cultural difficulties are idioms, collocations and proverbs with their respective subcategories. Some of the reasons for these difficulties are the students’ commitment to literal translation, the students’ lack of the cultural knowledge of both Arabic and English, the students’ heavy reliance on bilingual dictionaries, lack of bilingual specialized dictionaries on these cultural aspects of both Arabic and English and lack of Arabic-English translation practice as compared to English-Arabic translation. It is hoped that this study, along with its findings and suggestions, will contribute to improving Saudi undergraduate students’ quality of Arabic-English translation and provide new insights into the difficulties of Arabic-English translation as well as the difficulties of carrying out translation from the mother tongue into a foreign language

Assessment of Arabic-English translation produced by Google Translate

There have been very few research studies conducted on the assessment of Arabic-English translation produced by online Google Translate according to an extensive review of the literature available on this topic to date. The current qualitative study seeks to assess some samples of Arabic-English translation done by Google Translate and measure their accuracy against model translations of these samples provided by Dickins, Hervey and Higgins (2017) to determine if this translation method can be followed or not. The researcher collected the data (texts) from a book entitled Thinking Arabic Translation (Dickins, et al., 2017), fed them into Google Translate and conducted an error analysis to assess the quality of translation produced by Google Translate. The error analysis showed that Google Translate made lexical and syntactic errors which affected the quality of translation and caused the meaning of the translations to be unintelligible. The findings of the study revealed that Google Translate cannot be used as a valid translation tool for Arabic-English translation and that human interference is greatly needed to produce accurate and effective translation. Further research on the assessment of Google Translate in Arabic-English translation is recommended to either support the findings of this study or challenge them