Translating conjunctions in political journalistic argumentative texts from English into Arabic

• Main Author: Obeidat, Mohammed Mahmoud
• Published: University of Salford 2011
• Subjects: 410
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.537530

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.