Translating Business English Into Arabic

Forward by Prof. Alaeddin A. Hussain Translating Business English into Arabic is a comprehensive practical course-book and a good reference in business and finance translation for English and Arabic students, academics and professional translators. It discusses numerous translation problems and their potential solutions. The book focuses on methods of improving translation quality whilst giving clear and adequate explanations of the theoretical issues involved at various levels: word level, sentence level and text level respectively.

The Routledge Course in Arabic Business Translation: Arabic-English-Arabic is an essential coursebook for university students wishing to develop their skills in translating different types of business texts between English and Arabic. Practical in its approach, the book introduces translation students to the concept of translation and equivalence in the context of business texts, business translators, and the linguistic and syntactic features of business texts. It also highlights translation tools and technology in addition to the translation strategies which can be adopted to render business texts between English and Arabic. Key features in the book include: • Six comprehensive chapters covering (after the Introduction) the areas of economics, management, production, finance, and marketing in the translation industry; • Detailed explanation of the lexical and syntactic features of business texts; • Practical English and Arabic business translation texts featuring a vast business vocabulary bank; • Authentic business texts extracted from English and Arabic books containing economic, management, production, finance, and marketing texts; • Great range of English and Arabic translation exercises to enable students to practice their familiarity with business vocabulary they learned throughout the book; and • Glossaries following all English and Arabic business texts containing the translation of main vocabulary items. The practicality of the approach adopted in this book makes it an essential business translation coursebook for translation students. In addition, the carefully designed content helps students to easily explore different types of business texts, familiarize themselves with main words, and do translation exercises. University instructors working on English and Arabic business translations will find this book highly useful.

Due to a dearth of academic references in the area of English-Arabic audiovisual translation (AVT), this book represents a unique resource, in that it explores dubbing and subtitling into Arabic, a topic hardly discussed among academics both in the Arab world and worldwide. The book starts with some linguistic and audiovisual background, and lays new foundations for a discussion about the similarities between the translation of drama texts and AVT. It then moves on to highlight some grammatical, syntactic, semantic and functional challenges faced in subtitling with examples from various recent audiovisual material, as deictics, exophora, idiomatic language, register, negation, duality and plurality, and subject-predicate agreement in the target subtitled text. The book’s originality is manifest in its investigation of the obstacles encountered by new anonymous subtitlers by providing evidence in the form of genuine samples of their work. The book concludes with some original subtitling quality assessment reports, and presents effective strategies of subtitling.

Mughazy, a well-respected scholar of Arabic linguistics and a Georgetown Languages board member, takes a practical approach to the task of translating nonfiction from Arabic to English. Using Optimality Theory from linguistics, he provides a new way, based in linguistics, of looking at best practices for translation with the goal to find the most accurate translation. He aims to approach translation more scientifically (identify the problem, test hypotheses, selecting the best option and finding patterns) than those who use the more widely known literary translation theory. Although there are several books out on this topic, none address it as Mughazy has. This is a unique approach that offers a new, more practical way for those with advanced knowledge of Arabic to learn how to translate. As more schools begin or consider beginning translation programs, this book may find a larger audience over the years. Mughazy's book is rich with authentic examples, exercises (answer key included), and includes very valuable appendices for the learner. As Clara told me, "This is a book I wish I had had in grad school."

This study investigates the problems translators encounter when rendering features of Dickens's style in A Tale of Two Cities into Arabic. Examples of these features are singled out and analyzed. Then, they are compared with their counterparts in published translations of the novel in Arabic. The comparisons depend on back translation to give non-readers of Arabic a clear idea about the similarities and differences between the source text and target one(s). The features under focus are sound effects, figurative language, humor, repetition, and the French element. The discussion dedicated to onomatopoeia, alliteration, and rhyme shows that there is no one-to-one correspondence between English and Arabic in reflecting these linguistic phenomena. Translators may resort to techniques like rewording or paraphrasing to convey their propositional content at the expense of their sound effects. Problems also arise when rendering figurative language into Arabic. Various images in the novel are substituted by different ones that convey similar meanings in Arabic. Some of them are deleted or reduced to their propositional content. In addition, footnotes are used to convey cultural aspects. Translating humor shows the role context plays in facilitating the translator's task. Techniques of translating humor conveyed via substandard English are noted. The researcher also discusses translating humor that depends on background knowledge that the target text readers may not be familiar with. Further translation issues are noticed when rendering repetition. Some linguistic asymmetries between English and Arabic make translators dispense with repetition and resort to synonymy, collocations, and constructions that fit in Arabic. More problems arise when rendering the French element in various names, titles, and what might be considered as literal translations of French speech. Throughout the discussion suggestions are made to bring about more adequate renderings. This study also discusses the novel as a metaphor of translating. Many aspects of the novel are comparable to the translation process. Relationships among various characters provide a perspective from which the relationship between authors, translators/readers, and text can be seen. Finally, the significance of some examples of inter-language communication in the novel is pointed out.

Thinking English Translation is a practical guide to analysing and translating English source texts. Section I focuses on pre-translation analysis where students are guided to consider the features of a variety of English texts and the various implications for translation into other languages. Section II examines language variety in English in more detail and provides strategies for dealing with translation challenges in a wide range of text types. Thinking English Translation gives students a framework for a better understanding of how to approach source texts in order to tackle translation assignments, whether in class or in the workplace, with confidence. Stella Cragie a Qualified Member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, and former Principal Lecturer in Translation at the University of Westminster, is now a freelance translator. Ann Pattison is a former Senior Lecturer in Translation at the University of Westminster and now works as a freelance translator, editor and writer.

This clearly structured guide will help learners who already have a basic grasp of Arabic to hone their translation skills. The texts chosen for translation exercises have been carefully selected from a variety of authentic, contemporary texts across a broad range of genres.