This study investigates health-promoting messages in British and Saudi officials’ social-media discourse during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic. Taking discourse as a constructivist conception, we examined the crisis-response strategies employed by these officials on social media, and the role of such strategies in promoting healthy behaviors and compliance with health regulations. The study presents a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the tweets of a Saudi health official and a British health official that focuses on keyness, speech acts, and metaphor. We found that both officials utilized clear communication and persuasive rhetorical tactics to convey the procedures suggested by the World Health Organization. However, there were some differences in how the two officials used speech acts and metaphors to achieve their goals. The British official used empathy as the primary communication strategy, while the Saudi official emphasized health literacy. The British official also used conflict-based metaphors such as war and gaming, whereas the Saudi official used metaphors that reflected life as a journey interrupted by the pandemic. Despite these differences, both officials utilized directive speech acts to tell audiences the procedures they should follow to achieve the desired conclusion of healing patients and ending the pandemic. In addition, rhetorical questions and assertions were used to direct people to perform certain behaviors favored. Interestingly, the discourse used by both officials contained characteristics of both health communication and political discourse. War metaphors, which were utilized by the British Health official, are a common feature in political discourse as well as in health-care discourse. Overall, this study highlights the importance of effective communication strategies in promoting healthy behaviors and compliance with health regulations during a pandemic. By analyzing the discourse of health officials on social media, we can gain insights into the strategies employed to manage a crisis and effectively communicate with the public.

Modal adjectives of non-epistemic necessity are very common in language corpora. However, such adjectives are expected to behave differently in context, and thus differences between them should be highlighted in dictionaries. Nevertheless, there are a few studies that have examined modal adjectives with respect to their associated constructions and meanings in English. More importantly, studies on equivalent Arabic modal adjectives are scarce. Hence, the present study is quantitative and corpus-driven utilizing monolingual (i.e., the arTenTen18 and the enTenTen18) and parallel (i.e., Open Parallel Corpus or OPUS for short) corpora. Further, it is based on construction grammar and frame semantics to explore Arabic and English words of necessity. Using distinctive collexeme analysis, covarying-collexeme analysis, and LogDice as an association measure, the results reveal that the English necessary has various senses but occurs more significantly in predicative and extradosed constructions. Further, the Arabic words ḍarūrī and lāzim are more associated with necessary as translations, and each is commonly used in a unique construction to evoke certain semantic frames. More specifically, the word ḍarūrī associates with the extraposed construction to evoke semantic frames of cognitive processes, while the word lāzim is attracted to attributive constructions with nouns denoting procedures and intentional acts. They are considered to be cognitive synonyms, and hence they do not alter the truth value of the expressed proposition, and they have at least one sense in common. Based on such results, it is recommended that lexicographers exploit monolingual and parallel corpora for the purpose of creating more accurate dictionaries.

This study explores the translation of English passive constructions into Arabic, focusing on the prevalent translation shifts and the preservation of the source functions within this process. Utilizing a qualitative methodology, it analyzes passive constructions from an English economic-political article based on House’s (2015) Translation Quality Assessment model. It reviews all passive participles classifying them into verbal and adjectival ones. The research aims to understand how these translation shifts cater to the syntactic and semantic needs of the Arabic language, particularly how machine translation tools like Google Translation engine handle these transformations. Data collected include various English passive constructions and their Arabic translations, providing a foundation for assessing either their adherence to the target language’s norms and preferences or to the literal approach that may lead to affect such preferences and norms. Key findings reveal how Google Translation engine tends to translate according to Arabic norms and produce a natural translation while preserving the source functions. The five translation strategies used by Google Translate when translating passive constructions from English to Arabic in economic-political texts are: 1) adjectival phrases, 2) active structures, 3) passive structures with internal vowel changes, 4) verbless structures with verbal nouns, and 5) verbal phrases with 'tamma'. However, the influence of such an approach may lead to manipulating the source function, which may lead to misunderstandings or to unbalanced power relations.