Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Translating into Arabic'

Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2013.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study investigates the feasibility of translating the Arabic Qur’an into isiXhosa. The Qur’an has not yet been translated into isiXhosa and Xhosa-speaking Muslims who are unable to read and understand Arabic are facing a void in practising their faith. Xhosa-speaking Muslims also pray in a language that they do not understand and this robs them of close contact with the Almighty and as a result, the number of Muslims who speak isiXhosa does not increase. Through literature reviews and interviews it has been found that there is a great need for Muslims, who are target language speakers, to be able to communicate with Allah in their mother tongue, isiXhosa. Furthermore the study indicated that isiXhosa-speaking Muslims who, years ago, have converted to Islam are still struggling with the Arabic language. This study also investigates the view that the Arabic Qur’an cannot be translated into other languages because the Qur’an is the word of God delivered in Arabic to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). This view is not based upon the assumption that an Arabic Qur’an is untranslatable, but rather on the views of some Arabic scholars. There are also fears that meaning will be lost when the Qur’an is translated. However, the study showed that when translating the Qur’an, one is not seeking to translate only the meaning but also the message of the Qur’an. A conclusion was reached that all human beings, thus all nations and languages, are created by Allah. Therefore, it is acceptable for human beings to communicate and listen to Allah’s message in their own language. This study suggests that culture and language are inseparable and that both must be taken into consideration when translating. The Qur’an has already been translated into other languages and the translations are used without any problems, for example into English and KiSwahili. The Qur’an is available in other African languages as well. Therefore, this study suggests that the Qur’an can be translated into isiXhosa. The linguistic challenges can be addressed in the target language by a body consisting of translators of laypersons, translation experts and linguists specialising in both Xhosa and Arabic. However, the study shows that the title of the Xhosa Qur’an should indicate that the Qur’an is a translated text.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die studie ondersoek die vertaling van die Arabiese Koran na Xhosa. Die Koran is nie tans in Xhosa beskikbaar nie en Xhosa-sprekende Moslems wat nie Arabies magtig is nie, ervaar dit as ’n struikelblok in die beoefening van hul geloof. Xhosa-sprekende Moslems bid ook in Arabies, selfs al verstaan hulle nie die taal nie. Dit beroof hulle van noue kontak met die Almagtige en veroorsaak dat die Moslem-geloof nie by Xhosa-sprekers in townships inslag vind nie. Aan die hand van ’n literatuurstudie en onderhoude is bevind dat daar ’n groot behoefte onder Xhosa-sprekende Moslems is om in hul moedertaal met Allah te kommunikeer. Die studie het ook getoon dat Xhosa-sprekende Moslems wat hulle reeds jare gelede tot die Islam bekeer het, steeds met die Arabiese taal worstel. Die studie ondersoek ook die siening dat die Koran nie vertaal mag word nie, omdat die Woord van God in Arabies aan die profeet Mohammed (mag vrede oor hom heers) geopenbaar is. Dié siening berus nie op die aanname dat die Koran onvertaalbaar is nie, maar eerder op die uitsprake van Arabiese geleerdes. Daar word ook gevrees dat die Koran se betekenis verlore sal gaan tydens die vertaalproses. Die studie toon egter dat die vertaling van die Koran sal fokus op die oordrag van die boodskap en nie net die betekenis van woorde nie. Die gevolgtrekking van die ondersoek is dat alle mense, en dus alle volke en tale, deur Allah geskep is. Dit is dus aanvaarbaar vir mense om Allah se boodskap in hul eie taal te kommunikeer en aan te hoor. Die studie kom tot die gevolgtrekking dat taal en kultuur onskeidbaar is en dat albei in ag geneem moet word tydens die vertaalproses. Die Koran is reeds in ander tale vertaal en word sonder enige probleme gebruik, byvoorbeeld in Engels en Swahili. Die Koran is ook in ander Afrika-tale beskikbaar. Die studie bevind dus dat die Koran ook in Xhosa vertaal kan word. Die taalkundige uitdagings kan in die doeltaal hanteer word deur ’n vertaalspan wat bestaan uit leke, opgeleide vertalers en taalkundiges wat spesialiseer in Xhosa en Arabies. Die studie toon egter dat die titel van die Xhosa Koran moet aandui dat dit ’n vertaalde teks is.
I-ABSTRAKTHI: Olu phando luphande ukuba nako kokuguqulelwa esiXhoseni kweKurani yesi-Arabhu. Uphando lubangelwe kukuba kungekho Kurani iguqulelwe esiXhoseni okwangoku kwaye kuqwalaseleke ukuba aMaslamsi athetha isiXhosa, angayiqondiyo nangaluvayo ulwimi lwesi-Arabhu, nokuba afundile okanye awafundanga, ajongene nomngeni wokuba nokungoneliseki kwinkolo yabo. Inyaniso yokuba kufuneka athandaze ngolwimi angaluqondiyo, ibenza bangakwazi ukufikelela kuQamata kwaye ngenxa yoko, inani laMaslamsi alandi kwiilokishi apho aMaslamsi athetha isiXhosa. Uphando, ngokuphonononga iincwadi nangokubamba udliwano-ndlebe, lufumanise ukuba kukhona isikhalo esikhulu esisuka kuMaslamsi athetha ulwimi okujoliswe kulo ukuze akwazi ukunxibelelana noQamata ngolwimi aluqonda ngcono, olusisiXhosa. Uphando lubonise ukuba aMaslamsi athetha isiXhosa awaguqukelanga kwinkolo ye-Islamu kutsha nje kwaye umzabalazo wolwimi kudala uqhubeka. Uphando luxoxe ngoluvo lokuba iKurani yolwimi lwesi-Arabhu ayinakuze iguqulelwe kwezinye iilwimi njengoko iKurani ililizwi likaQamata eladluliswa ngolwimi lwesi-Arabhu kuMprofeti uMuhammada (uxolo malube naye). Uphando lungqine ukuba uluvo lokuba iKurani yolwimi lwesi-Arabhu ayinakuguqulelwa kwezinye iilwimi alusekelwanga ekungaguqulweni kombhalo kodwa kwizimvo zezifundiswa zama-Arabhu. Uphando kananjalo luxoxe ngomba wokuba uloyiko lokuguqulela iKurani yolwimi lwesi-Arabhu kwezinye iilwimi lubangelwa yinyaniso yokuba xa kuguqulelwa, kuye kubekho ukulahleka nokulahlekwa kwentsingiselo pha naphaya. Uphando slubonise ukuba xa kuguqulelwa iKurani, ubani akasobe efuna ukuguqulela intsingiselo kodwa umyalezo weKurani. Uphando lufikelele kwisigqibo sokuba abantu bazizidalwa zikaQamata kwaye badalwe bazizizwe ngezizwe nokuba bathethe iilwimi ngeelwimi. Ngoko ke, kwamkelekile ukuba abantu banxibelelane ze bamamele umyalelo kaQamata kulwimi olulolwabo. Uphando lufikelela esigqibeni sokuba inkcubeko nolwimi azohlukani kwaye ngexesha lokuguqulela, zombini (inkcubeko nolwimi) kufuneka zibe ziyaqwalaselwa. Uphando lubonise ukuba iKurani yaguqulelwa kwezinye iilwimi kwaye iinguqulelo zisetyenziswa ngaphandle kwengxaki. Imizekelo yeenguqulelo ziiKurani kwisiNgesi nakwisiSwahili. Uphando lubonise kananjalo ukuba zikhona ezinye iinguqulelo zeKurani kwiilwimi zase-Afrika. Ngoko ke, uphando lufikelele kwisigqibo sokuba iKurani ingaguqulelwa kulwmi lwesiXhosa kwaye nayiphina imingeni yenzululwazi yolwimi engathi ivele ingasonjululwa kulwimi ekujoliswe kulo luphando, ukuba kunokuthi umntu ongathi aguqulele ingabi nguye nawuphi na umntu ontetho isisiXhosa owazi ulwimi lwesi-Arabhu kwaye eliSlamsi, koko ibe yibhodi yokuguqulela eya kuthi ibe nabantu abohlukeneyo ngokwamanqanaba abo, ukusuka kulowo ungafundanga, iincutshe zokuguqulela, iingcali zolwimi kwiilwimi zombini. Nangona kunjalo, kuphando kuye kwaqwalaselwa ukuba iKurani eguqulelweyo ayinakubizwa ngokuba yiKurani kodwa mayibizwe ngegama elibonisa nelicebisa ukuba umbhalo lowo yinguqulelo.

This thesis investigates translation problems in translating from English to Arabic. Despite the fact that there are some taxonomies available, none is based on empirical research; moreover, none can be considered comprehensive. The present study provides a ranked taxonomy of problems in translating from English to Arabic that was developed through two empirical studies. The first is a case-study of the researcher translating a published corpus of short translation-class texts. Since the aim of this project is pedagogical, students of translation were the target population of the second multi-subject study. Here, 56 undergraduate and 18 postgraduate students in Arabic —+ English translation classes at Al-Fateh University and the Academy of Graduate Studies in Libya translated a sub-set of the same texts. By comparing the two groups' performance, the researcher could also find out the effects of translation experience/proficiency on the type and severity of problems. The taxonomy consists of four levels: supra, main, sub and sub-sub categories. The supra category includes problems of ST Comprehension and TT Production and problems of Transfer Process. The main category includes Micro-Language problems, Macro-Text level problems and Strategies and Techniques problems. The sub-category includes problems of Grammar, Vocabulary, Spelling, Rhetorical and stylistic devices, Cohesion, Register and style, Background Knowledge and Culture. The sub-sub categories include forty seven categories such as problems of Word order, Fixed Expressions, Spelling Slips, Irony, Omission and Additions. A tentative ranking of the difficulty of problems is based on three factors: perceived difficulty, error count and error severity. What distinguishes the taxonomy formulated in the present study from existing ones is comprehensiveness, e.g. in combining problems of ST comprehension, TT production and problems of transfer process, or in combining problems of the language system and extra-textual problems; and the ranking adds another dimension. The thesis consists of six chapters: Chapter One outlines the theme of the project and presents the research questions. Chapter Two reviews the relevant literature with an emphasis on translation problems and errors. Chapter Three presents the researcher case-study which sets the ground for the multi-subject main-study in Chapter Four. Chapter Five provides a model of English —* Arabic translation problems as exemplified by the taxonomy of translation problems and discusses the ranking system used and its outcome. Chapter Six, Conclusion, evaluates the outcome of the study, assesses the methodology that has been used to investigate the issues set in the research questions and discusses implications for further research.

This thesis is concerned with a particularly problematic area of Arabic-English translation, an activity likely to expand considerably as this century continues, and especially in non-literary domains. The past decade has seen increasing attention being paid by translation and other scholars to such issues as ideology, intervention, the role of narratives and the involvement of translation in global news dissemination. Not surprisingly, translation from Arabic looms large in all these areas. Political speeches and statements, often containing a disconcertingly unfamiliar blend of political and religious discourse, invite or require translation (or summary) into English by various agencies with their own particular ideological stances and agenda. Even with accurate and competent linguistic transfer there are many forms of possible manipulation. Equally, poor quality translation between two such incongruent languages can easily produce material that appears at least partly incomprehensible and may tend to make the source text and its producer(s) seem ridiculous to the target reader. Examples of this abound in the available translations of two of Saddam Hussein's speeches in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. To prepare the ground for an examination of these translations, this study first traces the history of ideas about translation and the development of the modem `interdiscipline' of Translation Studies. It then moves on to consider the problems of equivalence and translatability in Arabic-English translation, not only at the word and sentence level but also at that of whole texts, and extends this enquiry into the area of textuality and especially the phenomenon of intertextuality. Intertextuality is then seen to be carried within languages and cultures by the vehicle of ideology and discourse, and thus to represent a particular challenge to translators. Problems in the translation of the Saddam speeches are subsequently identified and discussed in the context of target reader norms and expectations, and in terms of a still rather hazy notion of `communicative equivalence

This thesis describes some of the conscious cognitive processes that are inherent in equivalence formation commencing from the transfer of deixis and culminating in the experience of source-to-target and target-to-source indexicality. Its scope is interdisciplinary and the methodology is varied depending on the segment of analysis. It combines a process-oriented analysis with a product based assessment. The stance is also partly subjective because it is based on the personal experience of the translator-researcher of four translating operations. Besides, the structure of the thesis is modular since the main objective is to develop a holistic translation model founded on verbal behaviourism. This approach seeks to put the translator back at the centre of translation theory. All the deictic and indexical aspects of the source-to-target and target-to-source lexico-grammatical, semantico-pragmatic, textual, literary, poetic, discursive, political, ideological and socio-cultural movements are monitored in order to identify the intrinsic cognitive, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic rules which govern the verbal behaviour of the translator. That is why the focus is on the translator’s parole though without any negligence of the influence of langue. As complex linguistic forms, deictic expressions and indexicalities are closely tracked and examined at different phases of the translating process commencing from the lexico-grammatical segment and moving to higher levels of textuality. The deictic projection of the translator-researcher is evaluated during the appropriation and manipulation of the deictic centre of the implied author. The aim is to unravel how the system-common and systemspecific forms preside over the cycle of equivalence formation starting from the source cue, moving to the intermediate draft versions and culminating in an actual target performance. Taking the standpoint of the anthropological linguist, nearformal correspondence is found to depend on intersystemic coincidence as to the similarities and differences between the content of the source form and the equivalent. Relativities of reading, translating and rewriting are identified as the places where the translator essentially exercises her/his creativity and fulfils her/his subjectivity in terms of competence and intuition. Based on decision theory, the verbal behaviour of the translator is defined in terms of the creation of a source-to-target deictic relationship during an indexical reaction to source cues. As equivalence emerges, it sets an interlinguistic precedence. This latter target form often develops into a socially motivated target icon thanks to the overt and covert intersubjective verbal cooperation between the members of a community of practice. The decision-making operation of the individual translator turns into an act of conscious and, sometimes, subconscious verbal reinforcement of established equivalents. It is also based on the elimination of some viable target options which either collapse from the final target performance during the rewriting phase or remain dormant in bilingual lexicographies. The encounter of the translator with different genres also divulges how bilingual competence, poetic attitude, literary prejudice, political affiliation, ideological conviction and sociocultural assumptions shape the mode of the intersubjective, intertextual, interliterary and intercultural dialogue that is eventually held between two universes of discourse. The target re-contextualisation and by implication the decontextualisation of the source ideological grounding are also explained in terms of the aspiration of the translator to adhere to a set of prevailing target linguistic, literary, poetic and socio-cultural norms. Thus target choice, be it informed or instinctive, grows to be a permanently negotiable verbal process among the active subjectivities of any given community of translators.

This study tackles the problems of translating medical terms from English into Arabic a. It uses an evaluative approach to investigate and discuss the problems and intricacies of translating medical terms from English into Arabic. The purpose of the study is to display the difficulties of translating medical terms and how they were tackled by postgraduate students who are competent in medical translation and professional Arabic translators who work in the medical field. The study adopts a qualitative-quantitative approach. It focuses on different types of medical terms, excluding pharmacy-related terms. In order to find out and identify the real difficulties behind translating medical terms and how they could be approached by experienced translators, the researcher utilized a questionnaire test that included a set of English medical terms to be translated into Arabic by students who were doing a PhD in translation. The same questionnaire was also given to a group of professional Arabic translators. As medical terms are the key components of medical texts, the questionnaire included forty-five diversified English medical terms taken from different medical reports, namely National Health Service (NHS) leaflets and flyers and World Health Organization (WHO) reports for 2007 and 2008. The official Arabic translations of these documents were used to assess the translations given by the subjects in comparison to and contrast with some medical dictionaries and reliable medical websites. The population of the study included 54 postgraduate students (doing PhDs in Arabic translation) in Libyan (the researcher’s origin country) and UK universities and 12 Arabic translators working in UK hospitals and clinics. The results from the data analysis showed that the translation of the medical terms posed real difficulties and challenges for the students and inexperienced professional translators although the experienced professional translators found them comparatively straightforward. Hence, the result highlights the problems of translating medical terms from English into Arabic and the importance of training to work in the medical field as a translator. Also, the study concluded that literal translation, the heavy use of transliteration, inconsistency, the students’ lack of sufficient experience and practice in medical translation, and lack of up-to date English-Arabic medical dictionaries are factors that have given rise to problems in medical translation. Also, the study showed that almost no professional translators use CAT tools or MT to help them translate the medical terms.

Affixes have been treated globally without adequate regard to their use in the discipline, and without proper consideration of translation problems. What is actually needed is a thorough treatment of affixes from the point view of terminological translation, and in the light of Arabic word-formation devices. This study is a contribution in this respect. It considers the translation of ten suffixes in linguistics terminology from English into Arabic. These suffixes are: -able, -ization, -lect, -eme, -nym, -graph, -graphy, -gram, -logy and -ics. In discussing the issues related to translating these suffixes, the following six-procedure approach was adopted: (1) identification of the origin and general use(s) in English of each suffix, (2) identification of the technical sense(s) of each suffix in linguistics, (3) identification of the ways through which Arabic expresses the concepts denoted in English by the discussed suffix, (4) critical discussion of the translation equivalents offered by Arab terminographers for the linguistic terms formed each of the above suffixes, (5) identification or suggestion of suitable translation technique(s) that achieve(s) precision, concision, and consistency, and maintain(s) formal and conceptual relationships between morphologically and semantically related terms, and (6) verification of the adopted translation techniques and linguistic devices by suggesting suitable translation equivalents for all included terms. The study is divided into six chapters the first of which is an introduction . The second chapter is devoted to some linguistic and terminological preliminaries, including (a) special nature of technical terms in general, (b) nature of linguistics terminology in English and its impact on translation, (c) significance of word-formation and its implications for terminological translation, (d) word-structure and word-formation in Arabic, and (e) nature of English suffixes and its implications for terminological translation into Arabic. Issues related to translating the selected suffixes proper are discussed in the core chapters as follows: the suffixes -able and -ization in chapter three, the suffixes -lect, -eme and -nym in chapter four, the suffixes -graph, -graphy and -gram in chapter five, and the suffixes -logy and -ics in chapter six.

The current study explores the metaphorical conceptualisations of biomedical knowledge in online articles found in the English/American popular scientific magazine Scientific American and their translation in the Arabic Majallat Al Oloom. The study aims to reveal the translatability of metaphors between the two languages from a cognitive perspective. It seeks to explore the translation techniques that are chosen to transfer the conceptual metaphors between the involved languages. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory initiated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980a/2003), is used as the principal theory for analysing the conceptual representation, typology and metaphorical mappings of these popular biomedical metaphors. The Semantic Field Theory of metaphor, proposed by Kittay and Lehrer (1981), is used to identify the source domains and target domains of these metaphors. The Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP), proposed by Pragglejaz Group (2007), is used to determine the metaphorical linguistic representation of these metaphors. The discoursal-pragmatic functions of these metaphors are investigated according to the typology of scientific metaphor, suggested by Boyd (1993), whereas the persuasive function of metaphors, put forward by Cherteris-Black (2004), is used in this discourse to identify their pragmatic functions. An amalgamation of translation methods, suggested by both Schäffner (2004) and Toury (1995), are used to analyse the translation procedures found in the Arabic magazine in order to determine whether the metaphors are retained, modified, paraphrased, deleted, or even if a new metaphor is created in the target texts in addition to new strategies detected in the corpus.

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.

This work springs from the subjective need for limiting the translation bias. It has been noticed that a considerable amount of translation is allowed to be published and read mainly due to the importance of its readability in the target language and often overlooking the goal(s) of the source text. This seems to derive from two common presumptions: (1) That a text goal is the result of an irretrievable and indescribable intentionality and (2) That target text readability and the preservation of the source text goal are two incompatible goals of translation. And this is in turn the result of the long lived dichotomy of translation studies into literal and free or text-based and reader oriented approaches. This work attempts to show that both (I) and (2) are misconceptions. Given a reasonable characterisation, intentionality is retrievable from the text itself and revealing of the text goal, the preservation of which does not exclude the readability of the TT and vice versa. Based on pragmatic insights drawn mainly from the Gricean Maxims and Cooperative Principle, Speech Act theory and the Text Linguistic model, this work proceeds to argue the case by analysing three Arabic texts and their twenty-two translations (each text is translated seven to eight times by different translators). These are of three most common types of prose: the expository, the argumentative and the instructive types. The analysis revolves around the identification of the text goal in the SL and its preservation in the TL. During this process a number of models and theories that constitute a controversial view of intentionality are outlined and discussed with a view to breaking the polarity they form and finding a medium path that is apt for charting more plausibly the context, the text and the process of translation. It is hoped that the implications of such work will help improve the quality of translation, provide a more explicit and plausible contribution to the account for the process and to further the effort towards standardising the theory.

Studies dealing with the translation of children's literature from English into Arabic are almost non-existent in both the West and the Arab world. This is despite the fact that most Arabic children's stories are mainly translation from foreign languages in which English as a source language has pride of place. Such a situation may be attributed to the fact that children's literature in the Arab world is regarded as subsidiary to adult literature and, thus, is not sufficiently discussed in literary, linguistic and/or translation studies. The thesis presents textual analyses of translation of children's literature from English into Arabic. To facilitate analyses, a framework will be developed, making use of a number of insights, including some recent text-linguistic approaches and the literary polysystem theory. An attempt is made to establish a connection between the various components of a children's story, including illustrations, and the textual choices of the translator. A number of stories translated from English into Arabic will be analysed both at the macro- and micro- levels of the text. Most of the stories used in this research are aimed at children between the age group of 4-8 years old. A range of issues will be discussed in the thesis. These include the influence of Arabic diglossia on translation children's literature (register); the way writers in Arabic and English construct their messages according to their intended audience and the influence of that on the target language reader (pragmatics); and the continuous interaction between the textual material and illustrations in both the source and target language texts (text-type, genre, discourse and illustrations).

The thesis explores the nature of the difficulties involved in translating legal texts, focusing mainly on translating English legal texts into Arabic. It shows that these difficulties fall into two categories, structural and terminological. the latter being more problematical. The language of law is distinct, rigid, precise and too formal. The difficulty arises when a translator's exposure to the cultural and legal environments of his working languages is unbalanced. This could lead a translator to misunderstand not only the significance of the specialised terms used, but also the distinctive features of syntax and register of the original language text. The other, and more significant, difficulty arises from the lack of equivalence at the term level in the two languages. The research was conducted in two parts. In the first part, original legal texts in both English and Arabic were analysed, and the linguistic exponents extracted and compared. In the second part of the research, the development process of the English and Arabic legal terminology were considered, and the differences in terminology imposed by the different nature of the legal environments explored, including the adversarial versus inquisitorial systems. An empirical study concludes the thesis. It consists of a questionnaire and a list of legal terms which twenty translators were asked to complete. The results of the research are quite controversial. The argument is that difficulties involved in legal translations are more conceived than real in so far as textual, syntactic and structural features are concerned. The similarities between English and Arabic legal texts in this respect are striking. The confusion and indecisiveness which usually reign when translating English legal texts into Arabic will be alleviated through providing examples from contemporary Arabic legal texts, accompanied by textual and linguistic analyses. The real difficulty is in the field of terminology. However, a corpus of terms in the criminal code is discussed, focusing on terms with direct application to the Australian situation. This should be of direct benefit to Arabic translators and interpreters in Australia and other English-speaking countries.
Master of Arts (Hons) (Translation)

This thesis examines a crucial area in the translation of poetic discourse, the translatability of modern Arabic metaphor into English. Two main questions are addressed. Firstly, what makes a particular metaphor easy to translate? Secondly, what makes another metaphor difficult or even impossible to translate? The thesis consists of two parts, theory and data analysis. The first part, theory, contains five chapters. In chapter 1 general theories of metaphor are discussed; interaction, imagination and experientialist theory. In chapter 2 poetic metaphor is examined; its interpretation, its aesthetic values, the part played by the imagination in processing metaphor, the importance of cultural knowledge and the problems of translation. In chapter 3 the metonymymetaphor relationship is assessed, and in chapter 4 the notion of dead metaphor is examined. In chapter 5, light is shed on the use of poetic metaphor in the Arab media and in particular on its use as an effective device to persuade the audience to accept the current peace discourse in the Middle East. Part 2, data analysis, also consists of five chapters of which chapter 6 is the introduction to the data analysis, and links the two parts of the thesis together. Chapters 7 to 10 concern the translation of metaphor in particular categories of poetry: in chapter 7 the emphasis is on autobiographical poetry (Ghäzi al-Ghusaybi : "In the Grip of My Fifties" and "Making Me a Grandfather"). In chapter 8 the focus is on the poetry of exile (Fadwä Tüqän: "Ruqayya" and "The Call of the Land"). In chapter 9 nationalist poetry is discusses (Fadwä Tüqan: "My Sad City" and "Hamza"), while in chapter 10 socio-political poetry is considered (Salah `Abd al-Sabür : "Sadness"). The findings of this research may be summarised as follows: the translation of Arabic poetic metaphor into English requires most importantly the recreation of a similar cultural experience in the TL. The data analysis shows that, in certain cases, it is easy to restructure the ST metaphoric experience with the same experience in the TL. On numerous occasions, however, the SL metaphoric experience has to be rendered by a different metaphor exhibiting a similar, or parallel, experience. Lastly, the data also demonstrate to the reader how, in certain contexts, the ST metaphor is untranslatable, simply because the host language cannot express satisfactorily the ST thought in the same or a similar way.

As yet, few explicit, practical and easy to implement marking scales for evaluating the quality of translations have been proposed. The purpose of this study is to introduce a new marking guide for making quantitative assessments of the quality of non-literary translations, and to test its practicality through a case study using the Arabic language. On the basis of the results, some generalizations about translation and translation quality assessment are made. Early treatments which dealt with the evaluation of translations are discussed, showing their merits and defects. The new marking guide is then described, including classification of errors and examples of each type of error. Guidelines are presented for the holistic subjective assessment, the guidelines are evaluated and the outcome discussed
Master of Arts (Hons)

The idea behind this research is motivated primarily by pronouncements made by (co)producers of English translations of modern Arabic fiction concerning the untranslatability of ‘Arabic’ and its status as a ‘controversial’ language, which presents a ‘hurdle’ in the way of the cultural and literary transfer of modern Arabic works of fiction to English. Is it the Arabic language alone that conditions or circumscribes the translation activity of modern Arabic fiction into English, or are there other socio-cultural and historico-political factors that influence the volume of such activity? In an attempt to answer questions such as the above and to understand and evaluate the extent to which such polemic comments are true, this thesis traces the socio-historical trajectory of the field of modern Arabic fiction into English throughout its phases of development. It sets out to identify and investigate the determinants that condition or circumscribe the translation of modern Arabic fiction into English. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social practice and its heuristic concepts, to include field, capital, homology and (dis)position, the English translation activity of modern Arabic fiction is examined as a socially constructed and constructing practice and the related individuals and institutions are investigated as socially regulated and regulating agents. The study’s aim is to analyse and interpret the diverse range of practices in this field of cultural production. To guide the analysis of this thesis, English translations of modern Arabic fiction, published between 1908 and 2014, are compiled and analysed both statistically and sociologically. They are combined with historical and archival materials, including several exchanges between various translatorial agents that have not been previously examined. Various factors informing, conforming and/or transforming the field of modern Arabic fiction in English translation are identified and analysed, with specific attention to their impact on the field’s structure and the positions available in it, the capital at stake, the agents involved, the dynamics of production and the volume of activity within the field. In the process of mapping out the field of modern Arabic fiction in English translation, the thesis redraws the boundaries of the field and suggests alternative dates to, as well as a different structure from, the phases identified by Altoma (2005). It also investigates several socio-cultural and historico-political factors that are not mentioned in Khalifa and Elgindy (2014) or other related studies. The retranslations of Naguib Mahfouz’s most controversial novel, ‘Awlād Ḥāratinā, are thoroughly examined as a case study in order to provide further insights into how socio-cultural and historico-political forces function in concert within the field of modern Arabic fiction in English translation. Particular focus is given to how these forces impact the field and its activities—fostering or subverting its outlook—and how they mediate the relationships between its agents and other intersecting fields. Through an in-depth analysis of paratextual elements, the thesis illuminates how (re)translations can be used as a tool to claim distinction in the field of translation and exposes the struggle between its agents. The findings have implications for the fields of translation studies in general, and modern Arabic literature/fiction translation and its publishing trends in particular. They demonstrate that a progression in the production and publishing of translations has taken place since 1908. This is in opposition to the prevailing belief that the flow of English translations of modern Arabic works of fiction has been primarily hindered by the Arabic language. However, there have been fluctuations in the velocity and volume of the translation flow. These fluctuations correspond to various internal and external socio-cultural and historico-political forces that affected the translation production and consumption and, consequently, the structure of the field and its agents’ practices. The evidence presented suggests that, instead of focusing on the literary value of a work, several modern Arabic works of fiction were translated because of their sociological/anthropological significance. This mediated and framed, to a great extent, the way the Arab world was perceived by and promoted in the Anglophone world. Given this finding, translations of modern Arabic fiction should always be perceived within, and not in isolation from, the larger context of their production, circulation and reception, especially in the case of English translations.

Insertion of source text (henceforth: ST) acronyms and single words/terms (henceforth: item/s) into target text (henceforth: TT) is relatively, so far, a neglected issue in translation studies. In the case of translating a text from English into Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth MSA) in Australia, we are dealing with the issue of inserting an item of a source text (English source text, henceforth EST) into a target text (Arabic target text, henceforth ArTT). The ArTT has newly introduced items in their Roman Letters (henceforth R.I), The ArTT has newly introduced items in their Roman letters (henceforth R.I), transliterated and/or translated with or without being accompanied by their EST counterparts in R.I.

This research aims to examine the challenges in translating legal texts with reference to Libyan commercial law. It analyses Libyan legal texts translated into English in terms of lexical, syntactic and textual features in order to identify the similarities and differences between Arabic and English legal texts and to tackle the major translation difficulties that face Libyan translators in the field of legal translation. The research adopts two methods in analysing the data; first, through a contrastive analysis of both Arabic and English legal texts; second, through an empirical study conducted by answering two surveys. The first survey was answered by legal translators and the second by lawyers specializing in legal drafting in Libya.

The main thesis of this study is that the translation of irony from English into Arabic in commentary texts in Australia is not amenable to traditional translation theories. The way Arabic and English speakers employ irony to express themselves reflects the linguistic and cultural distance between both languages. To tackle this problem, the study ventures into a contrastive analysis with reference to a number of linguistic and non-linguistic devices and concepts. It concentrates on the interpretation and the linguistic realisation of irony in both languages by utilising a number of contemporary linguistic models. The research takes the view that ironic devices are the foundation of the structural development of the texts in question. To demonstrate this, the speech act and conversational theories are used. The interaction between the ironic devices and the text development constitute a framework for the overall rhetorical meaning of the text. After an overview of the relevant literature of translation, contrastive analysis and comparative stylistics, an analysis/translation model is devised and implemented. A thorough contrastive analysis is made of English and Arabic commentary texts. Similarities and differences between the Arabic and English texts are found. Discrepancies were observed in the form, function and the number of ironic devices used in both languages. Based on the findings seven general strategies are proposed for the translation of irony in Australian commentary texts from English into Arabic.

This work provides an analytical critique of some selected English translations of the Original Quran. This research tries to demonstrate (1) whether the cultural convergence of English and Arabic, due to globalisation, is leading to any further linguistic intermingling and (2) whether the cultural backgrounds of translators, in terms of their native languages, religion and place of origin/residence have any influence on the quality of their translational works. The first chapter builds up a theoretical base, by reviewing thematically the available literature upon which translational strategies are established. The second chapter discusses the differences between the two cultures concerned and the translation of the main features of culture. This chapter concentrates on cultural factors from an Arabic/English translational perspective, i.e. their impact on the rendition of cultural features such as the ecological, religious, social, political, and material aspects. Chapter three is concerned with the literal linguistic differences. More specifically, literal language will be looked at on a grammatical basis. The fourth chapter will cover the figurative level of linguistic differences, as it is more cultural based. It will view the most important traditional tropes but will concentrate on the figures of speech that are most commonly used in the Quran and those than are stylistically useful and effective. Metaphor will be dealt with separately in chapter five. The analysis of chapter seven will be linguistically based on text patterns by examining and tracing chronologically the figurative language of the Quran through metaphorical discourse and to find out whether cultural convergence through temporal constraints has an effect on the way translators treat the Quran. Chapter eight focuses culturally on the profiles and cultural backgrounds of the translators of the Quran and their intentions in terms of whether they see the Quran as the word of God or whether they deal with it as a literary text.

This study investigates how and to what effect metaphors and similes from Tayeb Salih‘s novel Mawsim al-Hiǧra ilā ash-Shamāl (1966) were translated into English – a worthy topic, given the many linguistic and cultural differences between Arabic and English, and the difficulty of translating figurative language. The novel depicts aspects of the life and culture of the Sudanese people. Initially banned in the Arab world, it was voted, in 2001, the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century. This brought Tayeb Salih (1929–2009) fame and recognition, and translation into more than twenty languages. Season of Migration to the North (1960), the English translation by Canadian-born orientalist Denys Johnson- Davies (1922–2017), is the object of this particular study. This qualitative study employs descriptive translation studies (DTS) as the main theoretical framework, supplemented by insights gained from equivalence theories, theories of culture, the functionalist approach and cognitive studies. Following a textual approach, the study investigates the Arabic source text, the English target text, applicable translation theories and secondary literature on metaphors and similes as sources of information and/or data. It discusses the aforementioned translation theories, definitions, components and types of metaphors and similes in Arabic and English, as well as strategies and procedures of translating metaphors and similes. The researcher identifies, describes and analyses a selection of similes and metaphors in the Arabic source text, and how they were conveyed in the English target text. The study concludes with a discussion of the effects of the translation choices made and the strategies used.
Dissertation (MA (Applied Language Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2020.
African Languages
MA (Applied Language Studies)
Unrestricted

Translation evaluation is one of the main concerns of translation theorists, members of translation revision boards, and most importantly it is the concern of translator trainers. Translation quality has often been associated with the correctness of the grammatical structure and the appropriateness of the lexical item. Little concern has empirically been given to units larger than the sentence, i.e. text. This seems to be the result of the prevailing linguistic trend that has put more emphasis on a -context-free' sentence, rather than on text in context. This study proposes to investigate, discuss and develop a translation quality assessment model that takes text, not a sentence as the ultimate aim of analysis. The study will also attempt to explore the theoretical and practical implications of the model to be developed for the training of translators in the Arab world. The model to be developed should be based on the definition that translation is the replacement of a text in the source language by a semantically, pragmatically and textually equivalent text in the target language. Text, then, is the focus of interest in this study. Therefore, the model will be developed within the framework of text lingui4Vics for which text is regarded as a communicative occurrence. The developed model will serve as a means to evaluating the quality of Arabic-English translations of a particular type of texts, argumentative text type. Therefore, two argumentative texts in the form of newspaper editorials, selected from two Moroccan quality newspapers will be analyzed along the dimensions of what will be known in this study as a Situational/Textual model. The resultant "textual profile" will, then, be taken as a "yardstick" against which will be measured 81 translations collected from Fand School of Advanced Translation (FST) and 5 from the department of modern languages, Salford University (SU). The first introductory chapter lays out the main arguments of the thesis. Chapters two and three present and discuss sentence-oriented translation models, and text-oriented translation models respectively. Chapter four presents and discusses the following: a) the three aspects of meaning: semantic, pragmatic, and textual, b) language function vs. text function, and finally C) House's (1981) model of translation quality assessment. Chapter five presents the method of operation, discusses the decision criteria needed to deal with the dimensions linguistic correlates, and finally illustrates the extended situational/textual model for translation quality assessment. Chapter six is the application of the model on the two Arabic argumentative texts. In addition, argumentative text structure will be discussed and the difference between Arabic and English argumentative texts will be explained. Finally, chapter seven includes the source language text (SLT), and the target language text (TLT) statement of comparison and statement of quality, and a discussion of the theoretical implication of the model for the training of translators in the Arab world.

La traductologie fait depuis quelques années une entrée timide dans le Monde arabe et c’est notamment la traduction de la terminologie de cette discipline qui joue un rôle prépondérant à ce niveau-là. Or, s’il est parfois réussi, le passage terminologique se heurte souvent à des difficultés, voire des impasses. A travers l’analyse des termes arabes de la traductologie, c’est-à-dire à travers l’étude de leur construction, fonctionnement, circulation, évolution, etc., l’on peut d’une part, s’interroger sur le rapport parfois problématique de ces termes, et des idées qu’ils subsument, avec leurs origines étrangères, et d’autre part, révéler les temps forts, mais surtout les limites d’un tel passage, pour faire surgir l’état plus général de la réflexion arabe sur la traduction
In the last few years, translation studies have been growing slowly in the Arab World, a new phenomenom in which the translation of the French and English terminology of the discipline plays a crucial role. However, this transfer can have its successes as well as its setbacks. Through the study of the Arabic terms of translation studies, i.e. their creation, circulation, evolution, etc., it is possible, on one hand, to examin the relationship between the terms, and the ideas underlying them, and their outside influences, and, on another hand, to reveal the limits of this transfer, in order to describe the general state of translation studies in the Arab World

The subject of collocability has been a common concern among linguists, lexicographers, and language pedagogues recently. They find the linguistic aspect of collocation interesting, because words due not exist in isolation from other words in a language. They exist with other words. In every language, the vocabulary consists of single words and multi-word expressions. Collocations are among those multi-word expressions. The aim of this thesis is to characterize collocations in the Arabic language, to devise a classification of the semantic and the distributional patterns of collocations in the Arabic language and to examine the problems encountered in translating English collocations into Arabic. This will require an analysis of the collocational patterns in both English and Arabic, a classification of the translation outcomes, and therefore, types of errors adopted by translators, an indication of how frequent and significant each error is, and an analysis of the causes of each error.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2005.
"A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences, School of Languages and Linguistics, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2005." Includes bibliographical references and appendices.

This dissertation presents the first corpus-based system for translation from Arabic text into Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) for the deaf and hearing impaired, for whom it can facilitate access to conventional media and allow communication with hearing people. In addition to the familiar technical problems of text-to-text machine translation,building a system for sign language translation requires overcoming some additional challenges. First,the lack of a standard writing system requires the building of a parallel text-to-sign language corpus from scratch, as well as computational tools to prepare this parallel corpus. Further, the corpus must facilitate output in visual form, which is clearly far more difficult than producing textual output. The time and effort involved in building such a parallel corpus of text and visual signs from scratch mean that we will inevitably be working with quite small corpora. We have constructed two parallel Arabic text-to-ArSL corpora for our system. The first was built from school level language instruction material and contains 203 signed sentences and 710 signs. The second was constructed from a children's story and contains 813 signed sentences and 2,478 signs. Working with corpora of limited size means that coverage is a huge issue. A new technique was derived to exploit Arabic morphological information to increase coverage and hence, translation accuracy. Further, we employ two different example-based translation methods and combine them to produce more accurate translation output. We have chosen to use concatenated sign video clips as output rather than a signing avatar, both for simplicity and because this allows us to distinguish more easily between translation errors and sign synthesis errors. Using leave-one-out cross-validation on our first corpus, the system produced translated sign sentence outputs with an average word error rate of 36.2% and an average position-independent error rate of 26.9%. The corresponding figures for our second corpus were an average word error rate of 44.0% and 28.1%. The most frequent source of errors is missing signs in the corpus; this could be addressed in the future by collecting more corpus material. Finally, it is not possible to compare the performance of our system with any other competing Arabic text-to-ArSL machine translation system since no other such systems exist at present.

[EN] Research on Arabic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Arabic-English Machine Translation (MT) has been usually approached as two independent areas of study. However, the idea of creating one system that combines both areas together, in order to generate English translation out of images containing Arabic text, is still a very challenging task. This process can be interpreted as the translation of Arabic images. In this thesis, we propose a system that recognizes Arabic handwritten text images, and translates the recognized text into English. This system is built from the combination of an HTR system and an MT system. Regarding the HTR system, our work focuses on the use of Bernoulli Hidden Markov Models (BHMMs). BHMMs had proven to work very well with Latin script. Indeed, empirical results based on it were reported on well-known corpora, such as IAM and RIMES. In this thesis, these results are extended to Arabic script, in particular, to the well-known IfN/ENIT and NIST OpenHaRT databases for Arabic handwritten text. The need for transcribing Arabic text is not only limited to handwritten text, but also to printed text. Arabic printed text might be considered as a simple form of handwritten text version. Thus, for this kind of text, we also propose Bernoulli HMMs. In addition, we propose to compare BHMMs with state-of-the-art technology based on neural networks. A key idea that has proven to be very effective in this application of Bernoulli HMMs is the use of a sliding window of adequate width for feature extraction. This idea has allowed us to obtain very competitive results in the recognition of both Arabic handwriting and printed text. Indeed, a system based on it ranked first at the ICDAR 2011 Arabic recognition competition on the Arabic Printed Text Image (APTI) database. Moreover, this idea has been refined by using repositioning techniques for extracted windows, leading to further improvements in Arabic text recognition. In the case of handwritten text, this refinement improved our system which ranked first at the ICFHR 2010 Arabic handwriting recognition competition on IfN/ENIT. In the case of printed text, this refinement led to an improved system which ranked second at the ICDAR 2013 Competition on Multi-font and Multi-size Digitally Represented Arabic Text on APTI. Furthermore, this refinement was used with neural networks-based technology, which led to state-of-the-art results. For machine translation, the system was based on the combination of three state-of-the-art statistical models: the standard phrase-based models, the hierarchical phrase-based models, and the N-gram phrase-based models. This combination was done using the Recognizer Output Voting Error Reduction (ROVER) method. Finally, we propose three methods of combining HTR and MT to develop an Arabic image translation system. The system was evaluated on the NIST OpenHaRT database, where competitive results were obtained.
[ES] El reconocimiento de texto manuscrito (HTR) en árabe y la traducción automática (MT) del árabe al inglés se han tratado habitualmente como dos áreas de estudio independientes. De hecho, la idea de crear un sistema que combine las dos áreas, que directamente genere texto en inglés a partir de imágenes que contienen texto en árabe, sigue siendo una tarea difícil. Este proceso se puede interpretar como la traducción de imágenes de texto en árabe. En esta tesis, se propone un sistema que reconoce las imágenes de texto manuscrito en árabe, y que traduce el texto reconocido al inglés. Este sistema está construido a partir de la combinación de un sistema HTR y un sistema MT. En cuanto al sistema HTR, nuestro trabajo se enfoca en el uso de los Bernoulli Hidden Markov Models (BHMMs). Los modelos BHMMs ya han sido probados anteriormente en tareas con alfabeto latino obteniendo buenos resultados. De hecho, existen resultados empíricos publicados usando corpus conocidos, tales como IAM o RIMES. En esta tesis, estos resultados se han extendido al texto manuscrito en árabe, en particular, a las bases de datos IfN/ENIT y NIST OpenHaRT. En aplicaciones reales, la transcripción del texto en árabe no se limita únicamente al texto manuscrito, sino también al texto impreso. El texto impreso se puede interpretar como una forma simplificada de texto manuscrito. Por lo tanto, para este tipo de texto, también proponemos el uso de modelos BHMMs. Además, estos modelos se han comparado con tecnología del estado del arte basada en redes neuronales. Una idea clave que ha demostrado ser muy eficaz en la aplicación de modelos BHMMs es el uso de una ventana deslizante (sliding window) de anchura adecuada durante la extracción de características. Esta idea ha permitido obtener resultados muy competitivos tanto en el reconocimiento de texto manuscrito en árabe como en el de texto impreso. De hecho, un sistema basado en este tipo de extracción de características quedó en la primera posición en el concurso ICDAR 2011 Arabic recognition competition usando la base de datos Arabic Printed Text Image (APTI). Además, esta idea se ha perfeccionado mediante el uso de técnicas de reposicionamiento aplicadas a las ventanas extraídas, dando lugar a nuevas mejoras en el reconocimiento de texto árabe. En el caso de texto manuscrito, este refinamiento ha conseguido mejorar el sistema que ocupó el primer lugar en el concurso ICFHR 2010 Arabic handwriting recognition competition usando IfN/ENIT. En el caso del texto impreso, este refinamiento condujo a un sistema mejor que ocupó el segundo lugar en el concurso ICDAR 2013 Competition on Multi-font and Multi-size Digitally Represented Arabic Text en el que se usaba APTI. Por otro lado, esta técnica se ha evaluado también en tecnología basada en redes neuronales, lo que ha llevado a resultados del estado del arte. Respecto a la traducción automática, el sistema se ha basado en la combinación de tres tipos de modelos estadísticos del estado del arte: los modelos standard phrase-based, los modelos hierarchical phrase-based y los modelos N-gram phrase-based. Esta combinación se hizo utilizando el método Recognizer Output Voting Error Reduction (ROVER). Por último, se han propuesto tres métodos para combinar los sistemas HTR y MT con el fin de desarrollar un sistema de traducción de imágenes de texto árabe a inglés. El sistema se ha evaluado sobre la base de datos NIST OpenHaRT, donde se han obtenido resultados competitivos.
[CAT] El reconeixement de text manuscrit (HTR) en àrab i la traducció automàtica (MT) de l'àrab a l'anglès s'han tractat habitualment com dues àrees d'estudi independents. De fet, la idea de crear un sistema que combine les dues àrees, que directament genere text en anglès a partir d'imatges que contenen text en àrab, continua sent una tasca difícil. Aquest procés es pot interpretar com la traducció d'imatges de text en àrab. En aquesta tesi, es proposa un sistema que reconeix les imatges de text manuscrit en àrab, i que tradueix el text reconegut a l'anglès. Aquest sistema està construït a partir de la combinació d'un sistema HTR i d'un sistema MT. Pel que fa al sistema HTR, el nostre treball s'enfoca en l'ús dels Bernoulli Hidden Markov Models (BHMMs). Els models BHMMs ja han estat provats anteriorment en tasques amb alfabet llatí obtenint bons resultats. De fet, existeixen resultats empírics publicats emprant corpus coneguts, tals com IAM o RIMES. En aquesta tesi, aquests resultats s'han estès a la escriptura manuscrita en àrab, en particular, a les bases de dades IfN/ENIT i NIST OpenHaRT. En aplicacions reals, la transcripció de text en àrab no es limita únicament al text manuscrit, sinó també al text imprès. El text imprès es pot interpretar com una forma simplificada de text manuscrit. Per tant, per a aquest tipus de text, també proposem l'ús de models BHMMs. A més a més, aquests models s'han comparat amb tecnologia de l'estat de l'art basada en xarxes neuronals. Una idea clau que ha demostrat ser molt eficaç en l'aplicació de models BHMMs és l'ús d'una finestra lliscant (sliding window) d'amplària adequada durant l'extracció de característiques. Aquesta idea ha permès obtenir resultats molt competitius tant en el reconeixement de text àrab manuscrit com en el de text imprès. De fet, un sistema basat en aquest tipus d'extracció de característiques va quedar en primera posició en el concurs ICDAR 2011 Arabic recognition competition emprant la base de dades Arabic Printed Text Image (APTI). A més a més, aquesta idea s'ha perfeccionat mitjançant l'ús de tècniques de reposicionament aplicades a les finestres extretes, donant lloc a noves millores en el reconeixement de text en àrab. En el cas de text manuscrit, aquest refinament ha aconseguit millorar el sistema que va ocupar el primer lloc en el concurs ICFHR 2010 Arabic handwriting recognition competition usant IfN/ENIT. En el cas del text imprès, aquest refinament va conduir a un sistema millor que va ocupar el segon lloc en el concurs ICDAR 2013 Competition on Multi-font and Multi-size Digitally Represented Arabic Text en el qual s'usava APTI. D'altra banda, aquesta tècnica s'ha avaluat també en tecnologia basada en xarxes neuronals, el que ha portat a resultats de l'estat de l'art. Respecte a la traducció automàtica, el sistema s'ha basat en la combinació de tres tipus de models estadístics de l'estat de l'art: els models standard phrase-based, els models hierarchical phrase-based i els models N-gram phrase-based. Aquesta combinació es va fer utilitzant el mètode Recognizer Output Voting Errada Reduction (ROVER). Finalment, s'han proposat tres mètodes per combinar els sistemes HTR i MT amb la finalitat de desenvolupar un sistema de traducció d'imatges de text àrab a anglès. El sistema s'ha avaluat sobre la base de dades NIST OpenHaRT, on s'han obtingut resultats competitius.
Alkhoury, I. (2015). Arabic Text Recognition and Machine Translation [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/53029
TESIS

The term equivalence describes the relationship between a translation and the text from which it is translated. Translation is generally viewed as indeterminate insofar as there is no single acceptable translation - but many. Despite this, the rationalist metaphor of translation equivalence prevails. Rationalist approaches view translation as a process in which an original text is analysed to a level of abstraction, then transferred into a second representation from which a translation is generated. At the deepest level of abstraction, representations for analysis and generation are identical and transfer becomes redundant, while at the surface level it is said that surface textual features are transferred directly. Such approaches do not provide a principled explanation of how or why abstraction takes place in translation. They also fail to resolve the dilemma of specifying the depth of transfer appropriate for a given translation task. By focusing on the translator�s role as mediator of communication, equivalence can be understood as the coordination of information about situations and states of mind. A fundamental opposition is posited between the transfer of rule-like or codifiable aspects of equivalence and those non-codifiable aspects in which salient information is coordinated. The Translation Salience model proposes that Transfer and Salience constitute bipolar extremes of a continuum. The model offers a principled account of the translator�s interlingual attunement to multi-placed coordination, proposing that salient information can be accounted for with three primary notions: markedness, implicitness and localness. Chapter Two develops the Translation Salience model. The model is supported with empirical evidence from published translations of Arabic and English texts. Salience is illustrated in Chapter Three through contextualized interpretations associated with various Arabic communication resources (repetition, code switching, agreement, address in relative clauses, and the disambiguation of presentative structures). Measurability of the model is addressed in Chapter Four with reference to emerging computational techniques. Further research is suggested in connection with theme and focus, text type, cohesion and collocation relations.

La traduction automatique de texte arabe a reçu beaucoup d'attention au cours de la dernière décennie. La langue arabe, langue officielle de plus de 25 pays, est parlée par plus de 290 millions de personnes. Les changements politiques engendrés par les révolutions arabes ont mis sur le devant de la scène cette langue et ses multiples dialectes. Ce travail s'inscrit dans le cadre du projet BOLT dont le but est d'améliorer les performances des systèmes de traduction arabe-anglais pour des domaines spécifiques (SMS, parole conversationnelle, etc.)Dans cette thèse, j'ai enrichi le système de traduction à base de segments du LIUM à maints égards. Les systèmes à base de segments fournissent actuellement les meilleures performances. Ces systèmes sont basés sur deux modèles statistiques : le modèle de traduction et le modèle de langage. Dans l'objectif d’améliorer la qualité de traduction de l'arabe, nous avons mis l'accent sur trois aspects. Le premier aspect est la réduction des mots inconnus dans la sortie de traduction. Le second aspect de mon travail de thèse est l'adaptation au domaine ou à la tâche de la table de traduction. Finalement, je me suis intéressé à l'amélioration de la modélisation linguistique avec des réseaux de neurones. Ces modèles sont utilisés pour re-évaluer les n-meilleures hypothèses de traduction.Toutes les techniques développées ont été minutieusement incorporées dans le système du LIUM et évaluées dans trois campagnes d’évaluation internationales dans le cadre du projet BOLT
The Arabic language received a lot of attention in the machine translation community during the last decade. It is the official language of 25 countries and it is spoken by more than 380 million people. The interest in Arabic language and its dialects increased more after the Arab spring and the political change in the Arab countries. In this thesis, I worked on improving LIUM's machine translation system for Arabic-English in the frame-work of the BOLT project.In this thesis, I have extend LIUM's phrase-based statistical machine translation system in many ways. Phrase-based systems are considered to be one of the best performing approaches. Basically, two probabilistic models are used, a translation model and a language model.I have been working on improving the translation quality. This is done by focusing on three different aspects. The first aspect is reducing the number of unknown words in the translated output. Second, the entities like numbers or dates that can be translated efficiently by some transfer rules. Finally, I have been working on the transliteration of named entities. The second aspect of my work is the adaptation of the translation model to the domain or genre of the translation task.Finally, I have been working on improved language modeling, based on neural network language models, also called continuous space language models. They are used to rescore the n-best translation hypotheses.All the developed techniques have been thoroughly evaluated and I took part in three international evaluations of the BOLT project

The research examined the relationships between the morphological structures and features of Arabic and English verbs. An examination of the corpus in the research, which compiled 2000 verbs and their translation from various texts, showed that correlation between verb aspects are minimal. Therefore it is admissible to say that there is no correlation between morphological aspects and categories of Arabic and English verbs. Through analysis of Arabic verb patterns, the research demonstrated the primacy of a morpheme as one of the significant linguistic structural units that incorporates semantic and syntactic features, and also as a pivotal translation unit. The data analysis also signified that genre variation in Arabic is well established and can be clearly identified through morphological aspects of the verb and their distribution in text types.
Master of Arts (Hons)

The research examined the relationships between the morphological structures and features of Arabic and English verbs. An examination of the corpus in the research, which compiled 2000 verbs and their translation from various texts, showed that correlation between verb aspects are minimal. Therefore it is admissible to say that there is no correlation between morphological aspects and categories of Arabic and English verbs. Through analysis of Arabic verb patterns, the research demonstrated the primacy of a morpheme as one of the significant linguistic structural units that incorporates semantic and syntactic features, and also as a pivotal translation unit. The data analysis also signified that genre variation in Arabic is well established and can be clearly identified through morphological aspects of the verb and their distribution in text types.

Literary translation is the result of the interaction of culture, ideology and translation. It is also considered to be one of the most interesting challenges within a specific literary system due to its special nature and the variation in the cultural environment between source and target. Researching such challenges entails investigating the different factors that govern the translation process and product alongside its reception by a specific readership. This thesis is located within the framework of translation studies suggested by Holmes (1988) and developed by Toury (1995), as partly descriptive and partly process-reception oriented. It employs empirical interviews to investigate and describe the different economic, political, cultural and ideological factors that govern the translation process and product in Syria. Such a description provides the background for the assessment of the responses of groups of target readers to a specific text. In this research, D. H. Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gipsy and two Arabic translations are used as a sample analysis of the translation procedures adopted to tackle culturespecific references. The manual analysis in Chapter 5 of the cultural references in The Virgin and the Gipsy leads to the conclusion that translation procedures adopted in the published translations are unsystematic and that the two translators may not be fully aware of the effects of the chosen procedures on their target readers. The empirical methods are twofold. Interviews were carried out with Syrian publishers to explore the Syrian publishing conditions. The results yield a description of the sociocultural context of translation in Syria. Within that context, the responses of particular groups of target readers (English Literature graduates) to certain translation procedures are examined and then used to investigate the acceptability of the procedures used mainly endnotes and interpolations based on the students' responses to them. Four questionnaires were conducted with forty Syrian students. The results show that endnotes and interpolations are acceptable translation procedures in translating certain culture-specific references, depending on the needs of target readers and the importance of the cultural reference in understanding the text. This research demonstrates the potential of using reader-response theory and methods in analysing translation procedures that are adopted to deal with culture-specific references The results suggest that extensions and modifications of empirical models are necessary to gauge target readers' responses and to show how such enquiries can be used in translation studies.

Current research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tends to exploit corpus resources as a way of overcoming the problem of knowledge acquisition. Statistical analysis of corpora can reveal trends and probabilities of occurrence, which have proved to be helpful in various ways. Machine Translation (MT) is no exception to this trend. Many MT researchers have attempted to extract knowledge from parallel bilingual corpora. The MT problem is generally decomposed into two sub-problems: lexical selection and reordering of the selected words. This research addresses the problem of lexical selection of open-class lexical items in the framework of MT. The work reported in this thesis investigates different methodologies to handle this problem, using a corpus-based approach. The current framework can be applied to any language pair, but we focus on Arabic and English. This is because Arabic words are hugely ambiguous and thus pose a challenge for the current task of lexical selection. We use a challenging Arabic-English parallel corpus, containing many long passages with no punctuation marks to denote sentence boundaries. This points to the robustness of the adopted approach. In our attempt to extract lexical equivalents from the parallel corpus we focus on the co-occurrence relations between words. The current framework adopts a lexicon-free approach towards the selection of lexical equivalents. This has the double advantage of investigating the effectiveness of different techniques without being distracted by the properties of the lexicon and at the same time saving much time and effort, since constructing a lexicon is time-consuming and labour-intensive. Thus, we use as little, if any, hand-coded information as possible. The accuracy score could be improved by adding hand-coded information. The point of the work reported here is to see how well one can do without any such manual intervention. With this goal in mind, we carry out a number of preprocessing steps in our framework. First, we build a lexicon-free Part-of-Speech (POS) tagger for Arabic. This POS tagger uses a combination of rule-based, transformation-based learning (TBL) and probabilistic techniques. Similarly, we use a lexicon-free POS tagger for English. We use the two POS taggers to tag the bi-texts. Second, we develop lexicon-free shallow parsers for Arabic and English. The two parsers are then used to label the parallel corpus with dependency relations (DRs) for some critical constructions. Third, we develop stemmers for Arabic and English, adopting the same knowledge -free approach. These preprocessing steps pave the way for the main system (or proposer) whose task is to extract translational equivalents from the parallel corpus. The framework starts with automatically extracting a bilingual lexicon using unsupervised statistical techniques which exploit the notion of co-occurrence patterns in the parallel corpus. We then choose the target word that has the highest frequency of occurrence from among a number of translational candidates in the extracted lexicon in order to aid the selection of the contextually correct translational equivalent. These experiments are carried out on either raw or POS-tagged texts. Having labelled the bi-texts with DRs, we use them to extract a number of translation seeds to start a number of bootstrapping techniques to improve the proposer. These seeds are used as anchor points to resegment the parallel corpus and start the selection process once again. The final F-score for the selection process is 0.701. We have also written an algorithm for detecting ambiguous words in a translation lexicon and obtained a precision score of 0.89.

This thesis investigates the practices of Arabic localisation as it presents a neglected area of localisation research, localising to a developing market. The thesis aims to establish a connection between localisation and Translation Studies, by exploring the ways in which this area can be theorised starting from the approaches developed by Lawrence Venuti (in particular the notions of foreignisation and domestication), and Christiane Nord (translation as interpersonal activity). Creating a theoretical framework which marries the cultural turn and functionalist approaches helps address the dynamics of Arabic localisation on both micro and macro levels. The thesis also aims to provide a holistic view of Arabic localisation, by considering translation processes and outcomes, and by attempting to understand how Arabic localisation is perceived by its target audience. In order to achieve these goals, the thesis presents three case studies devoted, respectively, to the FIFA 15 video game, the Knorr website and the educational platform Blackboard Learn. It follows a mixed method approach to answer about the unique nature of each case study. This includes text analysis which covers each medium’s localisation literature, the Arabic translated content of the selected products and related business articles. In addition, relevant online materials, such as gaming fora and Youtube gaming channels, are analysed to assess the response of the FIFA and Knorr target audience to the translation they receive. Due to the privacy of Blackboard Learn’s content and users, access to a student’s and an instructor’s accounts were sought from an Arabic university, and a questionnaire was developed to assess quantitatively and qualitatively the Arabic users’ response to the platform’s Arabic localisation. The significance of this thesis lies in its methodology and findings. Employing strategies from a range of backgrounds, academic, professional and social, produces a novel methodology for translation research and for addressing the complexity of the discipline of localisation, as well as understanding the effect of its technical and commercial aspects on translation practices and outcomes. By approaching localisation from a Translation Studies perspective, the thesis contributes to both disciplines. The thesis highlights the ways in which localising to a developing market is different from many of the practices discussed in the localisation literature. In addition, the context of Arabic localisation proves to be a fertile ground where Venuti’s theory of foreignisation and domestication can be relocated, and the debate about it acquires new nuances.

How does localized translation relate to the Arabic language? According to the Localization Industry Standards Association, localization “involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language) where it will be used and sold,” (Esselink 2000a, p. 3). In monoglossic situations, localized translation involves producing translations that reflect regional language variation. Localizing Arabic translations presents a greater challenge because the Arabic language is characterized by both register variation and regional variation (Badawi 1973/2012; Bassiouney 2009; Ferguson 1959/1972). Existing literature addresses both localized translation and Arabic translation, but does not address localized Arabic translation specifically. Within the field of outcomes research, a public health subfield that studies patient populations health and well-being, prior studies that analyze Arabic translations of outcomes research documentation focus solely on the validity of universal, not localized translations. Studies in other specialized fields such as law also fail to include analysis of localized Arabic translation. This study analyzes register and regional variation in one universal and twenty-seven localized Arabic translations of the Work Productivity and Activity Impairment Questionnaire (WPAI), a clinical outcome assessment that is frequently localized for use in internationally sited clinical trials (Margaret Reilly Associates 2013). To determine the degree to which the Arabic WPAIs are localized, twenty-one variables including linguistic lexical items, morphological forms, and syntactic structures were coded as either salient Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or localized. Localized variables include salient Levantine Arabic (LA), Gulf Arabic (GA), and Egyptian Arabic (EA) features, shared MSA/LA/GA/EA variables and simplified variables. Then residual analysis of the expected and observed frequencies of each variable determined the overall degree of localization for each variable. Results indicate that salient MSA variables and localized variables are used in all twenty-eight WPAIs while localized salient LA, GA, and EA variables are completely absent. Although the inconsistent use of localized shared and simplified variables throughout the one universal and twenty-seven L-, G-, and E-WPAIs indicates that localization standards are met inconsistently, all twenty-eight WPAIs are successful within a functionalist framework because the use of salient MSA, shared, and simplified variables ensures that the text is accessible to a lay audience, which is the ultimate function of the target text (TT). This study sheds light on the inherent challenges of localized Arabic translation, which is caught between localization standards and Arabic language norms. Motivations for using salient MSA, shared, and simplified variables are discussed and implications of this study include improving methods for producing localized Arabic translations.

To our best knowledge this is the first attempt to investigate translation of the stylistic features involved in an interesting masterpiece of American literature, The Old Man and the Sea, written by Ernest Hemingway. This story has been translated into Arabic twice, first by Munir Ba'labaki and second by Dr Ziad Zakariyya. This thesis attempts to explore problems of literary translation from English into Arabic. It seeks to investigate some aspects of culture and style in The Old Man and the Sea and the two Arabic translations. The aim is to assess how much of the style and culture of the original has been preserved. It is also concerned with the problem of equivalence and translation units, since equivalence is considered the tool for detailed comparison. Chapter One deals with various approaches to evaluation of translation. This is done by reviewing a number of notions which have dominated the field of translation for a long time. One school believes that the act of translation is an art and that evaluation is limited to the aesthetic values of a literary work and depends largely on the critic's subjective decisions. Its objective is to provide a list of rules for the translator to follow in order to arrive at a translation of optimal value. The other school approaches translation as a linguistic operation and considers that a translation should be judged objectively, according to a linguistic analysis based on equivalence of the ST and the TT. Proponents of this view have developed models for evaluating. These models are addressed. Chapter Two is concerned with a review of certain concepts which are fundamental to literary translation. It attempts to highlight the theoretical approaches to the notion of 'equivalence', such as formal vs. dynamic and semantic vs. communicative equivalence, and different approaches to the question of translation units.