The Translatability of Utterances Containing Implicatures from Arabic into English (original) (raw)
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Pragmatic failure in translating Arabic implicatures into English
Babel. Revue internationale de la traduction / International Journal of Translation, 2016
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it attempts to demonstrate that Arabic utterances involving euphemisms, tautologies and ironies (henceforth Arabic implicatures) lend themselves readily to a Gricean interpretation and, second, it shows how Arabic implicatures in their immediate, social context of use exhibit pragmatic failures when rendered into English. The study examines and analyzes ten Arabic utterances involving implicatures in their original contexts of situation taken from Mahfouz’s (1947)Ziqāqal-Midaqwhich was translated by LeGassick (1966) into ‘Midaq Alley’, and Ṭayib Ṣaleḥ’s (1966)Mawsimu al-Hijra ila ashShamāl, which was rendered by Davies (1969) into ‘the Season of Migration to the North’. The study argues that to avoid pragmatic failure when translating Arabic implicatures into English, emphasis should be placed on conveying the pragmatic import of these utterances by the employment of various translation strategies ranging from those capturing the form and/...
Investigating the Translation of Arabic Conventional Implicatures into English
Translation Today, 2023
This paper examines the translation of Arabic conventional implicatures into English exemplified with synonymy and terms of address in two genres: religious (Quranic) texts and literary texts. The objective is to explore the conventional implicated meanings in Arabic cognitive synonyms and address terms which pose difficulties to translators. The data of the study consists of 12 excerpts drawn from Arabic source text and their 12 counterpart excerpts from the English translation. In case of conventional implicatures triggered off by synonyms, the study reveals that the translation of these implicatures depends mainly on the purpose behind their contextual use. If they are used to communicate certain implicated meaning as is the case in religious texts, conveying their inner meanings in translation becomes a necessity. For conventional implicatures triggered off by address terms, translators need to pay attention to their multi-dimensional semantics which are determined by the conventional meaning of the expressions uttered. In both cases translators are urged to use communicative and /or formal translation methods in order to emphasize and convey the message intended by the SL text.
Problems Encountered in Translating Conversational Implicatures in the Holy Qurʾān into English
This study investigates the problems that translators of the Holy Qurʾān encounter when translating utterances containing conversational implicatures (henceforth Qurʾānic implicatures), where what is meant goes well beyond what is said into English. The study is based on utterances singled out from the Holy Qurʾān which have been analyzed with reference to three well-known translations of the Qurʾān. The translations provide an empirical basis for the discussion of the problems while translating Qurʾānic utterances into English. In addition, some well-known exegetes (tafsīr) have been consulted to facilitate the process of analyzing the conversational implicatures in their Qurʾānic context and clarify the intended meaning. Two important and interrelated issues have been discussed. These are: how the utterances, containing conversational implicatures, have been translated and how they should (or can) be translated in accordance with the interpretation. More often than not, translators of the Holy Qurʾān fail to construe some conversational implicatures; therefore some strategies have been suggested by the researcher.
Unraveling Conversational Implicatures: A Study on Arabic EFL Learners
Open Cultural Studies, 2024
The present research aimed to evaluate the comprehension level of conversational implicature among a group of 30 senior Native Arabic-speaking students enrolled in the BA program of English Language and Literature at a UAE university. The participants' comprehension of implicatures was assessed by providing them with 20 excerpts from the American sitcom Seinfeld (https://www.seinfeldscripts.com/ seinfeld-scripts.html). The participants were asked to select the implied meaning of one underlined utterance as it occurred in context. The findings of the study indicate that Arab English as a Foreign Language learners have a slightly below-average proficiency in comprehending implicatures produced by native English speakers, which can be attributed to their lower level of proficiency, lack of pragmatic competence, and their lack of information about the American culture. The most challenging types of implicatures to grasp were those flouting the maxim of manner (35.34%), while the easiest types to interpret were those flouting the maxim of quantity.
2015
This research focuses on investigating Gricean Theory of Conversational Implicature and its application to the Arabic language. Semi-structured interviews with 15 participants who speak the Yemeni dialect were recorded for the purpose of investigating such a theory. There were four Ph.D. candidates, four M.A. candidates and seven B.A. candidates. All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, translated and interpreted. Both a qualitative and a quantitative approach were adopted.
APPLYING CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE UPON LIBYAN NON- STANDARD ARABIC SPEAKERS
APPLYING CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE UPON LIBYAN NON- STANDARD ARABIC SPEAKERS, 2018
When speaking, we suppose to understand each other, the words and utterances we make are simply met with our expectations. If we cannot understand each other as the speaker uttered something but it means either directly or indirectly something else; it means in somehow we floated the characteristics of the conversation either semantically, or pragmatically. The research is carried to apply some of the examples taken from the non-standard Arabic language, Libyan spoken dialect by Libyan students in Indonesia on the Conversational Implicature theory and mainly flouting the maxims. A number of the examples will be mentioned in Arabic and then translated into English and finally analyzed to see whether Grice's theory can be applied in Arabic or not. As well as semantically and pragmatically decision will be made whether Grice's theory in semantics and pragmatics in particular and other theories of Pragmatics in general are applied to English language or universal. The results showed that Libyan non-standard Arabic speakers apply the theory of conversational implicature and non-observing the principles.
Implicatures in the Persian and Turkish Translations of Four American Short Stories
Translation of implicature as a challenging issue in Translation Studies is addressed in the present study. Considering this notion, the researchers' main concern after extracting implicatures was to investigate the translation procedures proposed by Molina and Hurtado Albir (2002) and also Newmark (1988) in translating implicatures including: 1. Linguistic amplification, 2. Linguistic compression, 3. Literal translation, 4. Transposition, 5. Established equivalence, and 6. Free translation. To achieve the aims of the study, six questions were proposed to examine the translation procedures adopted by the translators and to find out the most frequent translation procedures utilized in rendering the relevant implicatures. To this end, four short stories entitled "Cat in the Rain", "Indian Camp", "Killers", and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" by American writer Ernest Hemingway and their two best-seller Persian and Turkish translations by Ahmad Golshiri and Shirmohammad Qudratoghlu were chosen to be analyzed. Through a contrastive analysis in this qualitative descriptive study, sixty-nine implicatures were identified and extracted from all these short stories according to the maxims defined by Grice (1975) and compared with their corresponding translations. The results indicated that the Turkish translator has used linguistic amplification and free translation that do not lead to reproduce the implicatures in the target text; therefore, the Persian translator was more successful in recreating the implicatures in the target text (see Abbasi, 2016).
Implicature in Metaphors: A Linguistic Analysis of Metaphorical Expressions in Arabic Poetry
The aim of this paper is firstly to put metaphors within the right scope; that is because some respectable tradition views metaphor as a central semantic process and that it does not involve pragmatics at all, and secondly, to investigate how metaphors are yielded in both English and Arabic languages, recognized from other figures of speech/tropes, and interpreted pragmatically. In order to put metaphors within the right scope, it is necessary to cover the main issues revolving around the main semantic theories, namely the comparison and interaction theories, and to establish the need for pragmatic interpretation taking into account the context and cultural elements to reach the full meanings lurking in the background of the figurative language and to truly appreciate the metaphorical force. The first chapter overall accounts for the pragmatic need when dealing with the interpretation of metaphors, because the semantic traditions according to many linguists and scholars including Stephen C. Levinson, John R. Searle, and Wilson and Sperber, fail to give a proper account of metaphors. The second chapter, however, is devoted to the application of those approaches and affirms that they should work simultaneously for a full understanding of metaphors. Two of the most impressive writings of the Iraqi poet Al-Sayyab were adopted to analyze some of the metaphorical expressions they abound with.