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- Title
Pragmatic failure in translating Arabic implicatures into English.
- Authors
Shehab, Ekrema
- Abstract
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it attempts to demonstrate that Arabic utterances involving euphemisms, tautologies and ironies (henceforth Arabic implicatures) lend themselves readily to a Gricean interpretation and, second, it shows how Arabic implicatures in their immediate, social context of use exhibit pragmatic failures when rendered into English. The study examines and analyzes ten Arabic utterances involving implicatures in their original contexts of situation taken from Mahfouz's (1947) Ziqāq al-Midaq, which was translated by Le-Gassick (1966) into 'Midaq Alley', and Ṭayib Ṣaleḥ 's (1966) Mawsimu al-Hijra ila ash-Shamāl, which was rendered by Davies (1969) into 'the Season of Migration to the North'. The study argues that to avoid pragmatic failure when translating Arabic implicatures into English, emphasis should be placed on conveying the pragmatic import of these utterances by the employment of various translation strategies ranging from those capturing the form and/or function to those capturing the communicative sense independently.
- Subjects
EUPHEMISM; SOCIAL context; TRANSLATIONS; ARABIC language; ENGLISH language
- Publication
Babel: International Journal of Translation / Revue Internationale de la Traduction / Revista Internacional de Traducción, 2016, Vol 62, Issue 1, p21
- ISSN
0521-9744
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1075/babel.62.1.02she