TRANSLATION AS A CORRELATIVE OF MEANING: CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC TRANSFER BETWEEN ARABIC AND ENGLISH

• Main Author: AL-NAJJAR, MAJED FLAYIH
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1984
• Subjects: Linguistics
• ISBN: 9798644990641

The dissertation addresses itself to three fundamental questions about translation. The first is the correlation between meaning and translation. The second is what areas in the source language are recalcitrant to translation. A third question concerns the controversy on whether translation is a scientific activity or is humanistically indeterminate. The study deals with translation between Arabic and English. It is organized in eight chapters. The findings deduced from this study are summed up as follows: The principal problems of translation are problems of meaning. To translate a text is to transfer life patterns from the source culture which are mirrored in that text by the linguistic system of that culture into a receptor culture and restructure them by using the linguistic system of the receptor culture. Untranslatable elements are of two types: conceptual amd structural. Type one consists of concepts which exist in the source culture but are not part of the receptor culture. These include lexical and metaphorical meaning. Type two includes syntactic, phonological, and sociodialectal structures. These cannot be duplicated in the receptor language. Receptor-language syntactic restructuring involves processes of deletion, insertion, permutation, and substitution. The phonological features of a poem are untranslatable. Finally, Quine's argument (1960) that translation is indeterminate is corroborated. It is found that indeterminancy may occur in the lexical, syntactic, and stylistic components of meaning, as well as in the focus of communication.