Abstract
It is argued that legal language should be formal, precise and clear to avoid ambiguity and/or misunderstanding. As rights and duties are communicated through modals, clarity and precision in drafting and translating them is crucial. Otherwise, there is a possibility of conveying loose messages in the source text or different and/or inconsistent messages in the target text. However, the drafting of Arabic modal expressions does not follow clear guidelines, and their translation differs from one translator to another. This paper investigates how deontic modality of obligation and prohibition is used in The Leeds Annotated Parallel Corpus of Arabic-English Constitutions in comparison to The Leeds Monolingual Corpus of English Constitutions. More specifically, the paper presents a classification of these modal expressions and investigates the different lexical variants expressed in a Corpus of Arabic Constitutions. The paper uses corpus-based tools to analyse the different lexical forms used for deontic modality of obligation and prohibition in Arabic and how they are rendered into English. Results of such analysis are compared to a non-translated Corpus of English Constitutions to find out whether the deontic meaning of the modals is comparable to the set of deontic modals used in the constitutions originally drafted in English. The corpus-based analysis gave a detailed classification of a variety of modal expressions used in the Arabic Corpus. It also showed that the translation of deontic modals of obligation and prohibition from Arabic into English is influenced by the source text lexical variations; however, the corpus techniques employed in the study managed to capture some comparable modals in both corpora.
Highlights
Many Arabic linguists who investigated the Arabic modal system (Wright 1967, Suleiman 1999, Badran 2001, Badawi et al 2004, Abdel-Fattah 2005, Ryding 2005, Eades 2011, El-Farahaty 2015, among others) concluded that Arabic does not have a standard modal system the same way English does. This is due to the complexity of the formal grammatical structure of the modal system, in addition to several features which are inherent in the modal system in general such as indeterminacy and ambiguity and context-dependent semantic meaning (Leech & Coats 1980, von Fintel 2006, and Abdel-Fattah 2005
One crucial issue noted in Abdel-Fattah (2005) is that translating Arabic modals follows the stylistic preferences of the translator, a matter that will have a direct impact on the accuracy of the modal meaning and the consistency of translating them
Abdel-Fattah’s (2005) and El-Farahaty’s (2015) studies have been applied to a small scale corpus, and due to the absence of authentic corpora, none of these or previous studies identified a well-defined list of deontic modal expressions and their equivalents in English
Summary
The study uses two corpora, one parallel corpus and a monolingual comparative corpus to complement the analysis by comparing translations to non-translations (Baker 1993, 1995, 1996; Biel 2014), and to provide some techniques of advanced comparative analysis (cf. Biel 2014). MEC (557,086 English words/ 677,056 tokens) was compiled to provide some techniques of advanced comparative analysis (cf Biel 2014) It comprises the up-to-date revised versions of the constitutions of eight countries whose formal language is English, the earliest revised version was Australia in 1985, and the latest revised version was the USA in 2016. The corpora were compiled, annotated and uploaded on Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al 2014) which is the toolkit used for the quantitative analysis It noteworthy that there is no consistency in the use of English across the above listed diverse regions, as demonstrated by Corpus Linguistics studies that there are different “world Englishes”, the limitations of the MEC corpus for “techniques of advanced comparative analysis”.
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