LINGUISTICS AND TRANSLATION: SOME SEMANTIC PROBLEMS IN ARABIC-ENGLISH TRANSLATION.

摘要

Translating from Arabic into English involves certain morphological, syntactic and semantic problems. To understand these problems, one has to return to the cultural and social backgrounds of the Arabic language and try to discover how these may affect the process of translating into English. It is also essential to note that Arabic is a VSO, non-Indo-European language whose speakers differ in cultural and social behavior from those of the Western languages.;The problem, therefore, will be threefold: (a) to look into the cultural and social backgrounds of Arabic and discover the basic elements which affect the process of translation, (b) to account for the peculiarities of Arabic lexicon and structure by examining some Arabic texts that have been translated into the English language by native speakers of English, and (c) to relate the above descriptions and findings to a theory of translation in the light of what Nida termed "dynamic equivalence." It is on the areas of cross-cultural communication, connotative meanings, intersentential levels and textual levels that this study will focus most.;Furthermore, recent developments in the fields of theoretical linguistics and the research done in the fields of Case Grammar and semantics have paved the way toward a deeper understanding of underlying structures. In this study, the works of Fillmore (1968, 1971), Chafe (1970), and Cook's (1979) Matrix Model will furnish some basic concepts of semantic representations in order to account for the analysis of certain data.;The study shows the pragmatic aspects of translating certain Arabic texts into English. It also gives a short account of the use and application of translation in some educational areas. Finally, it provides implications for an interpretable theory which considers translation both an art and a science.