Translating conjunctions in political journalistic argumentative texts from English into Arabic

Obeidat, MM

Abstract

Political Journalistic Argumentative Texts (PJATs) have always been challenging for
translators of this type of texts when rendering them into Arabic. One major problem
facing translators of this genre is the translation of conjunctions which is often
overshadowed by researchers. This study recovers the meanings and functions of
conjunctions and their role in maintaining cohesion and coherence in discourse. Due to the
political nature of this type of discourse and mistranslating the relations residing between
adjacent sentences which mainly rely on conjunctions to signal to them, ideology, when
mistranslating conjunction, may come to surface causing more problems relating to
meaning interpretation, namely on the part of the receivers of translated texts.
With this in mind, this study has been conducted with the aim of finding out the most
frequently used conjunctions and whether they are adequately translated from English into
Arabic, the most frequently problem-causing conjunctions, and identifying the relationship
between conjunctions, on the one hand, and cohesion and coherence, on the other. To
make this happen, a corpus of 40 PJATs translated into Arabic in two major Jordanian
newspapers, Al-Rai and Ad-Dustour, has been studied with specific attention to the
process of translating conjunctions in light of Halliday and Hasan's (1976) model of
conjunctions. Conjunctions were initially looked at as being translated or non-translated,
and each of the headings was examined according to a three step scale: adequate, semiadequate,
and inadequate.
The findings of the study show that the overall number of conjunction relations (both
syndetic and asyndetic] in the corpus was 1469 including additive, adversative, causal,
temporal, zero conjunction, and paragraph beginnings conjunction relations. The findings
have shown that a significant number (52.82%) of these conjunction relations was either
inadequately or semi-adequately translated into Arabic. The study has also revealed that
asyndetic conjunction in English represents one of the major problems in texts translated
into Arabic featuring 44.38% of the total number of the conjunction relations; for this
particular problematic area, this study argues that the Arabic conjunction (j) can be the
best equivalent to the English asyndetic conjunction.
This relatively high percentage of mistranslations at the level of the relations residing
between sentences forming a larger text will inevitably cast its influence on the quality of
the translated text on three major levels: cohesion, coherence and ideology, with the aim
of reflecting on these three influential levels in discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis was
adopted as a framework of analysis to show how the ideological background of the
receivers, namely the Target Language receivers, may interfere and lead them through
irrelevant and sometimes dark tunnels as a result of misunderstanding the semantic
relation existing between adjacent sentences in translated texts.
To sum up, this study of PJATs represents a corner stone for translators, researchers and
students of translation as it has shed light on the problem of translating conjunctions from
English into Arabic, highlighted the problematic areas and proposed some guidelines to
dealing with the conjunctions and their close connection with cohesion and coherence in
discourse.
KEY WORDS:
Conjunction in English, Conjunction in Arabic, Cohesion, Coherence, Ideology, Political
Discourse, Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, Argumentation, Journalese,
and Translation.

Citation

Obeidat, M. Translating conjunctions in political journalistic argumentative texts from English into Arabic. (Thesis). Salford : University of Salford

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Oct 3, 2012
• Award Date: Jan 1, 2011