Meaning and back translation

Al-Shunnaq, AAT

Abstract

This thesis sets out to contribute to the literature on back translation, a mode of translation that has not been seriously investigated. The study aims at investigating the reliability of back translation as a research tool with particular emphasis on the issues of explicitation and implicitation shifts. The investigation corpus consists of two contemporary American-English novels, At Risk by Patricia Cornwell and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and their translations into Arabic as "قلب الخطر" and"الطريق" respectively. One chapter from the former novel and a number of sections from the latter novel are selected, and their Arabic translations are examined in order to identify examples of explicitation and implicitation shifts. The identified examples of the translation are back translated into English by two professional translators. A categorisation of explicitation and implicitation shifts identified in the corpus is discussed using Klaudy's Model (1996), and the extent to which meaning is retained using Larson's framework (1998).
This study consists of seven chapters. The first chapter serves as an introduction. The second chapter discusses the two translational phenomena of back translation and intermediate translation. The third chapter is to examine the tension between meaning and translation. The fourth chapter provides a comprehensive account on the two main concepts that will frame the analysis of the shifts: explicitation and implicitation. The fifth chapter provides an overview of the study of the corpus and presents the methodological approach. The sixth chapter provides a number of explicitation and implicitation shifts and their back translations, to establish the reliability of back translation in retaining the explicitation and implicitation shift and its meaning. The seventh chapter presents the conclusions and recommendations of this study.
The main contribution of this study is to show that even though back translation is often used as a research tool, its validity and reliability are taken for granted. However, it is shown that the back translation might not retain the explicitation and implicitation and or its meaning and thus impair its usefulness as a tool for comparing a text and its translation.

Citation

Al-Shunnaq, A. Meaning and back translation. (Thesis). University of Salford

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Jun 28, 2014
• Additional Information: Funders : University of Petra / Jordan;My father / Abdulla Al-Shunnaq