Shop signs, in the Jordanian public commercial environment, have invariably been studied from linguistic, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic perspectives, but they have been utterly ignored from a translational point of view. This study, the first of its kind, investigates various problems and inadequacies pertinent to the subject under discussion. Shop signs are selected here from a number of heterogeneous cities, and the translation errors therein, committed by communicators, were empirically analyzed and categorized. Language and culture are, of necessity, inextricably intertwined, and this nexus is particularly apparent in the world of local commercial shop signs, and thus it has been tackled for its direct relevance to the translation of these signs. This investigation, therefore, highlights the linguistic (e.g., word-order, wrong lexical choice, and reductionist strategies), and extralinguistic (i.e., sociocultural and promotional) factors that have turned out to lead to translation inappropriateness and unparallelisms, information skewing, and, consequently, serious semantic-conceptual problems in the produced TLTs. This study may, in a way, provide educated insight into the trendiest translation practices in this field, and the way shop signs are most often verbalized, mishandled, and mistranslated.
Folkloric song-translation is a research area that diverges acutely from the centre of interest of interlingual-intercultural transfer in general, and Arabic-English translation studies in particular. This paper attempts to shed light into Abdu Mousa’s culture-bound song marren wa ma ma’hin hada (they have passed by without a company), as an instance of the challenges that folkloric songs may pose in translation, and how, when translating between cultures with different discursive properties, the translator has a certain leeway when reformulating the lingual-cultural import of the source text for target readers. Drawing on Low’s (2005a) Pentathlon Approach, and placing a strong emphasis on content, the study highlights the problems and difficulties involved in translating this type of song, and demonstrates a number of unique aspects of translating folkloric songs, which involve elements of sense, naturalness, cultural references, and how these elements are interconnected and entangled with each other. These insurmountable difficulties are accounted for by the existing sharp linguistic and cultural differences between Arabic and English, and, the incompatibilities between the two working concept systems of the two languages, which add to the intricacy of translating this type of literature. On a less formal level, colloquialism has been found to have had its way to the source language text, a factor which further complicates the abridgement process.La traduction des chansons traditionnelles folkloriques constitue un domaine de recherche qui s’écarte sensiblement de celui du transfert interlinguistique et interculturel en général, notamment de l’arabe à l’anglais. Le présent article porte sur la chanson d’Abdu Mousa, dont le titre est marren wa ma mahin hada (ils sont passés sans être accompagnés), comme exemple des défis posés par la traduction de ce type de chanson. Il montre jusqu’à quel point le traducteur a une marge de manoeuvre pour reformuler l’apport linguistico-culturel du texte de départ, lorsqu’il travaille avec des cultures dont les discours présentent d’importantes divergences. Se basant sur la stratégie Pentathlon de Low (2005a) et mettant l’accent sur le contenu, l’étude met en relief les difficultés et les problèmes inhérents à la traduction de ce genre de chanson et souligne un certain nombre d’aspects qui lui sont uniques (éléments de sens, idiomaticité et références culturelles, ainsi que les rapports entre ces éléments). Au-delà de la difficulté inhérente à la traduction de ce genre lui-même, elle rend compte des difficultés insurmontables liées aux différences linguistico-culturelles et conceptuelles de l’arabe et de l’anglais. Enfin, à un niveau moins formel, le ton familier du texte source ne fait que compliquer le processus de traduction
The study aims at identifying the cultural problems, encountered in the translation of Jordanian proverbs into English. The significance of the study stems from the fact that it stresses on the social, colloquial, and folkloric use of proverbs that adds to the various implications of them. It relies on the selection of proverbs that are used and understood in different regions of Jordan. They address different social and cultural issues, and this makes indispensible the relationship between Jordanians and their cultural and social values. The conventions of the proverbs reflect their historical background, and the actual incidents or events that have led to their formation, utterance, currency, and frequency. The whole proverbial context has been pivotally and elementally noticed in proverbs' construction, and this fact enhances both the utterer and the audience in the comprehension of the proverb. Translating the selected proverbs into English collides with many challenges, of which the cultural ones are observed as the most manifest. What adds to the translation challenges is the colloquialism of the proverbs, which gives them enough semantic, social, and cultural values that cannot be stripped or ignored in the literal translation of the proverbs.
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