Translation of English fiction titles into Arabic

This study examines the Arabic translation of 165 English idiomatic expressions in political interviews in terms of Baker’s translation strategies (2018) and investigates the deployment of idiomatic expressions in terms of semantic category based on Fernando (1996) and Kovacs (2016). The corpus of the study consists of 17 political interviews conducted in English by King Abdullah II from 2013 to 2023 and translated officially into Arabic. The results show that the paraphrasing strategy accounts for more than half the data (56.36%), followed by the strategies of ‘similar meaning but different form’ (23.63%) and ‘similar meaning and form’ (15.15%), while the omission strategy comes last at (4.84%). The analysis indicates that although the overall quality of the translation is acceptable, there are a few cases where the emotiveness of the idiomatic expressions and the appropriate genericity are underestimated. In terms of semantic category, the results reveal that the degree of opaqueness/transparency is a determining factor for choosing the translation strategy, viz., the paraphrasing strategy accounts for (82.69%) in translating opaque/semi-opaque idiomatic expressions against only (27.69%) in transparent/semi-transparent ones. The study concludes that much attention should be paid to the sensitive nature of the degree of emotiveness in idioms and the relevant generic constraints

This paper examines accidental humor as it manifests itself in international public notices displayed in English. It shows that accidental humor, just like intentional humor, essentially stems from script opposition and script overlap (Raskin, 1985). However, it lacks intentionality, which plays a key role in contrived humor. In this way, accidental humor is based on the interaction between the text and the receiver, apart from the producer. In particular, accidental humor in interlingual communication is the output of the producer's language incompetence in the target language, whereas it is the result of the producer's landing in unintended ambiguity in intralingual communication. In such humor, therefore, the initiator infringes one or more maxims of conversation (Grice, 1975), unlike intentional humor, where the joke teller exploits conversational maxims for communicative purposes, in order to generate conversational implicature and, subsequently, laughter. Keywords: accidental humor; intentionality; implicature; script opposition; flouting a maxim; infringing a maxim; interlingual communication.

This paper aims to explore the strategies that translators adopt when rendering English proper nouns into Arabic and, consequently, offer both qualitative and quantitative insights into this process. It is a case study of proper nouns in professional Arabic translation based on one English novel (The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008); translated into Arabic by Taiba Sadeq (2011). Proper nouns are categorized and analyzed in terms of internal syntactic structure (Central, Converted and Extended proper nouns), as well as thematically (e.g. personal names, names of institutions, bodies of water, etc.), with an eye to establishing correlations between the type of proper noun and the translation strategy opted for. The results indicate that the translator’s choice between different strategies is governed by two main factors. Firstly, the translator needs to check whether the proper noun individualizes entities by means of ordinary language predicates (e.g. common nouns), proper nouns proper, or a combination of both, as each type usually requires a different strategy. Secondly, the translator needs to pay attention to the degree of comprehensibility and naturalness of his/her rendering, which may necessitate consolidating the single strategies of transliteration and translation with addition in the form of a generic word or even substitution in the case of idiomatic proper nouns. The paper concludes that proper nouns cannot be treated uniformly in translation between English and Arabic because they belong to different categories and, consequently, they may require different translation strategies including transliteration, complete translation, partial translation, transliteration plus addition, and translation plus addition.