Cohesive and Textual Explicitness in Translation From English into Arabic: A Case Study Of a Multi-Genre Text

Abstract

ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates cohesive and textual explicitness in the Arabic translation of the English book In Shock. The originality of this study arises from the source text genre, as it is considered to be a multi-genre book (medical-literary biography). Also, being theory-driven, the analysis is based on the model of cohesion proposed by Halliday and Hassan (1976). The dissertation aims to look into how cohesive devices have been changed in the Arabic target text, and how they contribute to the target text’s cohesiveness. What are the reasons for textual cohesive explicitness? Is the phenomenon genre-specific? Also, is textual cohesive explicitness inevitable in translation from English into Arabic? The methodology consists of the use of a computer-aided translation tool, namely ‘SDL TRADOS’, to translate entire selected parts of the text. The ST and its corresponding TT are aligned side-by-side in various translation procedures to produce a cohesive TT. The commentary has extracted examples of cohesive devices from the source text and analysed how they have been translated in the target text. The investigation concludes that a considerable number of cohesion shifts have occurred in the translation process in order to produce a cohesive target text. References, conjunctions, and reiterations are the most dominant cohesive devices in the English source text, while substitution and ellipsis are the least used cohesive devices found in the source text. The target text opts to use explicitation as the primary strategy in translating into Arabic. The TT uses conjunctions, references, and reiteration as the dominant cohesive devices or tools to make the ST language units explicit, to avoid ambiguity, and to enhance comprehensibility of the translated text.