Translation of English nonfiction titles into Arabic
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Issue Date
2022
Authors
Bazzi, Hiba
Keywords
Translation; titles; approaches; procedures
Type
Journal Article
Peer-Reviewed
Peer-Reviewed
Abstract
The study reported on here used a corpus approach to identify approaches
to the translation of English nonfiction titles into Arabic. The quantitative analysis
shows that the literal translation approach takes a first seat featuring 76% of the titles
in the corpus. The other translation approaches include employment of related words
(9%), paraphrase/explication (7%), transliteration alone (7%), and adaptation (1%).
The qualitative analysis revealed that title translation can be a critical and challenging
task bounded by linguistic and socio-cultural factors, as well as commercial interests
and ethical considerations that the translator needs to consider. Accordingly, the
researcher explored the adequacy of the Arabic renditions by examining the linguistic
accuracy and the preservation of source title functions as well as the totality of
meaning, with reference to the target culture. With regard to the translation of
nonfiction titles in this study, the literal translation approach effectively produces
linguistically intact target titles which, in most cases, are in line with the target
culture. Nevertheless, translators may resort to other approaches when literal
translation fails to achieve a comparable linguistic, cultural, and commercial effect in
the target language.