Abstract
Pragmatic markers, either primary or secondary, contribute to the specificity of languages and are sensitive on being translated. This study traces the use of well, the commonest pragmatic marker in the English discourse, in a corpus of translated Arabic novels. The study, too, addresses the influence of the translators’ phonological awareness on their word choices, in the same corpus. Adjacent consonants, consonant-starting and quarter-syllabic words are studied in four groups: free writing of native authors as a control group (G1), literary translations by native English translators (G2), literary English translations by Arabic translators (G3) as well as literary English translations by joint effort (native-speaking and non-native-speaking translators) [G4]. The findings are statistically compared using one-way ANOVA test. Results show a statistically significant difference in the use of the pragmatic marker well and in the use of the three phonological patterns among the four groups. The findings are interpreted and implications are offered for the pragmatic gap and linguistic competence between native-speaking and non-native-speaking translators.
Highlights
Mateo (2014) emphasizes that translator’s phonetic and pragmatic awareness are instrumental to rendering a successful translation
This study aims at measuring the impact of pragmatic markers acquisition and phonological awareness of non-native speaking and native-speaking translators on translating literary texts from Arabic into English
Postulating that translators exercise the same learning mechanism in studying L2, this study investigates the influence of the use of English pragmatic markers and of phonological awareness of English phonotactics by non-native speaking and native-speaking translators on translating literary texts from Arabic into English
Summary
Mateo (2014) emphasizes that translator’s phonetic and pragmatic awareness are instrumental to rendering a successful translation. In English, pragmatic markers have a variable and context-bound character Their meaning cannot be described in the same way as lexical elements which have a more stable lexical meaning (Aijmer, 2015). This study uses literary translation materials, as a rich medium for measuring language production, among native-speaking and non-native speaking translators with regard to pragmatic markers acquisition and phonological awareness. All the studied novels are originally written in Arabic and are translated into English. This study hypothesizes that phonological awareness affects word choices among the studied groups of translators. The third hypothesis postulates that both incompetent use of well, as a prototypical pragmatic marker, and deficient use of phonologically problematic words for Arabic learners affect the overall readability of the rendered translation among the studied groups
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