Abstract
Modality deals with the assessment of the intrinsic and extrinsic meanings of a statement in terms of control over a situation and judgement of truth value. This paper focuses on the functionality and translatability of expressing modality from Arabic into English and French to determine its effects in translation. The analyses are carried out on literary translations from Arabic into English and French. The data reflective to the occurrence of expressing modality are identified, collected, categorized and analyzed. The analysis reveals that there are more modality use in the English translations than in the Arabic source texts and French target texts, which reflects some aspects of Arabic language and French language peculiarities on the one hand and some aspects of English language peculiarities on the other hand. Moreover, the frequent use of modality in English is found to be more functional in that it enhances more the meaning. Keywords: Modality translatability, language peculiarity, probability, obligatoriness, willingness, usuality, Arabic English translation, Arabic French translation
Highlights
Toury (1985) classifies comparative studies in translation into (a) comparative studies of different target translations of one source text (ST) into one target language (TL), (b) comparative study on different phases, and (c) comparative study of one ST into different languages. He writes: One may compare several translations into one language done by different translators, either in the same period or in different periods of time...; or one may compare different phases in the establishment of one translation, in order to reconstruct the interplay of ‘acceptability’ and ‘adequacy’ during its genesis...; or, several translations of what is assumed to be the same text into different languages, as an initial means of establishing the effects of different cultural, literary, and linguistic factors on the modelling of a translation.(Toury 1985: 24)
Expressing Modality is used to indicate the speaker’s attitude to the receptor. It can be categorized into probability, obligatoriness, willingness, and usuality
The expressing modality markers that are identified in the texts understudy are modality markers of probability, obligatoriness, willingness, and usuality
Summary
Translation has become an independent discipline from linguistics since the twentieth century after Holmes paper on translation presented in 1972 in the Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics in Copenhagen(Holmes, 2000). This has channelled translation activities, translation studies, and scope of translation into descriptive research. In this new perspective, Toury (1985) classifies comparative studies in translation into (a) comparative studies of different target translations of one source text (ST) into one target language (TL), (b) comparative study on different phases, and (c) comparative study of one ST into different languages. The objectives of this paper are: a) to describe the behaviour and function of expressing modality in translating from Arabic into English and French
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