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The Translation of Circumlocution in Arabic Short Stories into English

Summary

The paper asks how well English translators handle Arabic itnab (circumlocution), meaning the purposeful use of extra wording, in literary prose. The authors bring together scattered classical Arabic rhetorical scholarship and adopt Eskander's (2003) function-based scheme. It has three classes: eloquence, emphatic and directive circumlocution, each with subtypes. They test the hypothesis that these classes line up with the English metadiscourse categories, textual and interpersonal. The data are four Arabic short stories by well-known writers, including Idris, Saleh, Kanafani and El-Zayat, paired with their published English translations. Each instance is judged for appropriateness using Nida's (1964) model, and the translators' techniques are recorded as addition, subtraction or alteration. The study concludes that Arabic circumlocution corresponds closely to English metadiscourse. The interpersonal classes, which correspond to hedges and certainty markers, caused the most translation failures. The work matters because it gives a cross-lingual, function-oriented treatment of stance and emphasis devices that translators tend to lose or distort.

Key points

  • The taxonomy follows Eskander (2003):
    • Eloquence: specific-after-general, and clarification after an ambiguous mention.
    • Emphatic: repetition, hyperbole and tagging, for example with a proverb.
    • Directive: bracketing (parenthetical comment) and hedging.
  • The parallel corpus is four Arabic stories with translations from Husni & Newman (2008), Davies (1967), Kilpatrick (1978) and Cohen-Mor (2005).
  • Emphasis is graded by the presumed state of the hearer: open-minded, uncertain or denying. Each state calls for progressively stronger certainty markers, which can be grammatical or lexical, including certainty verbs.
  • The authors identify three recurring translation errors:
    • turning a hedge into a certainty marker;
    • mistaking circumlocution for propositional content;
    • dropping circumlocution items altogether.
  • Emphatic and directive circumlocution, the interpersonal classes, proved hardest. The paper claims circumlocution is an essential part of metadiscourse, but not all of it.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The paper classifies "extra" wording by what it does for the reader, such as clarifying, emphasizing or softening, and then maps it to textual versus interpersonal metadiscourse; this separates stance from content in a way that carries across languages. — For Mova (frames): prag could attach hedges, certainty markers and parenthetical comments to a separate speaker-stance layer, so they set confidence on a frame without becoming arguments in it.
  • I2. Bracketing is defined by a deletion test: if removing the span leaves the meaning intact, it is commentary, and the same test separates hyperbole from completion. — For Mova (learn): we could run a negative control that deletes a candidate metadiscourse span and checks that the compiled world stays the same, flagging spans that wrongly change entities or events.
  • I3. Emphasis strength is tied to how much doubt the speaker assumes in the hearer, from neutral, to unsure, to denying. — For Mova (frames): the speech-act module could read stacked intensifiers as an implicature that the speaker expects disagreement, which would help with stance and irony detection.
  • I4. Purposeful repetition is kept apart from empty redundancy: a repeated vocative or phrase adds emphasis, not new information. — For Mova (world): repeated mentions should strengthen emphasis on an existing state rather than create duplicate events or entities.
  • I5. The error list (hedge flipped into certainty, stance absorbed into content, stance deleted) works as a checklist for judging whether a translation is faithful. — For Mova (back): text → graph → text and translation outputs could be checked automatically for preserved stance polarity and strength, not just matching propositions.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2411.02887 · arXiv 2411.02887

@misc{shehab2024translation,
  title = {{The Translation of Circumlocution in Arabic Short Stories into English}},
  author = {Shehab, Dalal Waadallah},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2411.02887},
  eprint = {2411.02887},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2411.02887}
}

References

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