Arabic Equivalents Research Articles

A linguistic analysis of English nativised lexes and their perception by online gamers in Jordan

The occurrence of loanwords that have been Arabicized or nativised in the gaming genre necessitates an investigation into the nature and implications of this phenomenon. The objective of this research is to examine the systematic and rule-governed process of nativisation, as well as its impact on language adaptation within the gaming community in Jordan, where English is spoken as a foreign language. Additionally, it seeks to explore gamers' perceptions of these words and determine whether these nativised English words are used together with their Arabic equivalents in the gaming genre, or if they are replacing their equivalents based on Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles and Ogay, 2007). The sample consisted of 100 participants [aged 12–16] enrolled at the Islamic Educational College in Amman. Based on watching video clips taken from various live streams containing the target words in context, participants were asked to complete a multiple-choice task focusing on the meaning and origin of these words. The results indicate that nativisation in the gaming genre in Jordan follows a systematic and rule-governed pattern. The majority of participants demonstrated awareness of the meaning and origin of most words, suggesting a conscious effort to adapt them to Arabic linguistic patterns. Our argument is that by using these nativised words in online gaming, gamers aim to establish rapport, strengthen connections, gain approval, earn rewards (such as points), and align themselves with professional gamers. Furthermore, gamers distance themselves from the language style of newcomers who employ Arabic words instead of nativised words, and are considered vulnerable in gaming.

Understanding EFL Students’ Processing of Idiomatic Expressions Out of Context: Insights Gained From Think-Alouds

The current study examines how EFL students confront the difficulty of comprehending English idioms without supportive context. It aims to study the online processing strategies Saudi EFL learners employ when giving the meaning of English idioms. The Idiom Recognition Test (IRT) and Think-aloud protocol were used to vary and measure the idiom's difficulty and to analyze the processing of the idiom immediately after visual perception. Twenty frequently used idioms representing formal and informal English were selected. They were of three types: English idioms, which have identical forms and meanings of Arabic equivalents; English idioms, which have similar forms and meanings of Arabic equivalents; and English idioms, which differ from Arabic idioms. Results showed that most of the participants had difficulty interpreting the English idioms. Moreover, participants most often drew on the literal meaning, using the compositional parts of the idiom. Referring to an L1 idiom was the second most successful strategy but the fourth most often employed out of the six strategies. The third most effective strategy was background knowledge, yet it was the least used overall. Consequently, the results support all the idiom processing models that emphasize the literal meaning over the figurative one.

Paratextual reframing of visual elements in Al Jazeera’s coverage of the 2022 conflict between Russia and Ukraine

Since it started in February 2022, the Russian-Ukrainian War has gained the interest of numerous news organizations. The reframing of visual elements of ten news items about the Russian-Ukrainian War is examined in this study. The Arabic versions are extracted from the Al Jazeera website, while the original articles were taken from The Atlantic and Foreign Affairs. Baker’s narrative theory is used in this paper (Baker, 2018). Comparing the visual elements in the English articles to their Arabic equivalents allowed researchers to pinpoint how they are paratextually reframed in the translated versions. The findings showed that Al Jazeera occasionally produces various, varied, and incongruent interpretations of the narrative. This could lead to multiple and, occasionally, dissimilar perspectives on the same story. The findings showed that Al Jazeera utilized paratextual reframing strategies involving visual elements, such as images, videos, and typographical features, to reframe the Russian-Ukrainian War. The research suggests that while the original media outlets initially framed the war according to their agenda, Al Jazeera altered this frame in the translated text. As a result, the target audience’s perception of the event under examination may change during the entire process.

Second Language Learners’ Awareness of Adjectivalisation: The Challenge of Differentiating between Verbal Participles and Adjectival Participles by Libyan EFL Students

This study explores Libyan EFL learners’ awareness of the process of adjectivalisation, and more specifically the process of using the participle form and progressive form of verbs as adjectives used in English Language. In addition, this study aims to test Libyan students’ recognition of adjectival participles and whether they will be able to distinguish them from verbal participles, prove them as real adjectives with their progressive – ing, and participle – ed, – en forms, and find out appropriate Arabic equivalents of these adjectives easily. The data gathered for this study were based on students’ marks they got by answering a two-part test consisting of an introductory part which is a multiple-choice test, followed by the main part which is the translation test. In the first part, the participants who were 30 students enrolled in Translation III course, were asked to choose the correct adjectivalised participle, and in the second part, the participants were asked to translate some participles used as adjectives into Arabic language. The study was mainly based on quantitatively as well as qualitatively analysing students’ answers to the test questions. The findings of this research revealed that only 16.67 % of the participating students successfully recognized verbal participles used as adjectives. On the other hand, 33.33 % of the students have appropriately rendered the involved de-participle adjectives into Arabic. In addition to the previous results, 20 % of the respondents properly recognized the present participle adjectives, whereas 50% of them truly recognized past adjectival participles in English.

An Application of Syntactic Semantic Analysis in English and Arabic Translation

This paper aims at studying certain syntactic and semantic aspects in English and Arabic. It specifically applies the syntactic method of Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) and the semantic model thematic roles in certain English sentences and their Arabic translation from a linguistic point of view. It provides a theoretical background of TGG and thematic roles as the basic framework of the analysis applied in this study. The data includes selected English sentences from three different short stories along with their Arabic equivalents. The co-analysis of the English sentences and their Arabic translations is based syntactically on Chomsky's TGG (1965) and semantically on Fillmore's thematic roles (1977). The results of the study shows that syntax and semantics within these two languages make some kind of interface. This emphasizes the idea of linguistic universals advocated by Chomsky. The application of co-analysis indicates that the syntactic and semantic aspects can be relatively similar in English and Arabic particularly in terms of the type of the noun phrases in the deep and surface structures and semantic roles. The study concludes that translation is a practical field where the feasibility and utility of linguistic theories and ideas can be tested, and that integration and application of more than one approach in translation such as TGG analysis and semantic roles can help in producing more appropriate translations. However, it should be stated that syntax semantics interface and its overlapping can't be solely used in translation studies.

English to Arabic Braille Neural Machine Translation Through Corpus Augmentation

In this paper we have shown the development of English to Arabic Braille Neural Machine Translation (NMT) System. For our experiments we have developed two NMT systems. The first was the baseline NMT system which was trained only on the English-Arabic parallel corpus whereas the second NMT system has some sub modules for handling syntax transfer of English to Arabic and translation/transliteration of English Named Entities into Arabic equivalents. Then the system used this code-mixed text to train the NMT model. The English-Arabic parallel corpus was taken from Opus parallel corpus repository. For preprocessing of the English text Stanford's Stanza NLP Library was used. The trained NMT models were evaluated using standard automatic MT evaluation metrics and their results were also corelated with human judgements. It was found that the corpus augmented NMT system performed better than the baseline NMT system.

The Translatability of Sports Metaphors in Political News

The present study investigates the difficulties and problems in deciphering the figurative meaning of English sports metaphors that appear in political news and, more specifically, in US presidential campaigns and their Arabic equivalents when they are under the detailed scrutiny of translation. In order to highlight the problem under discussion, the study explores the translation of some sports metaphors in their original context of use. Several English sports metaphors from different sports fields are collected randomly from British and US online newspapers with their possible equivalents in Arabic that are used in comparable texts that report the same topic. This comparative study focuses on the different strategies that are followed in rendering English sports metaphors in Arabic online newspapers. The researcher employed an empirical, descriptive and analytical approach where sports metaphors are described and classified. Their translations on online Arabic newspapers are also discussed and examined. The analysis will be based on the conceptual metaphor framework proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1984). Thus, it will be important to assess the conceptualized experiences across different cultures, particularly between English and Arabic, in this study. The findings reveal that English sports metaphors pose a metaphorical and cultural threat to the Arab translator, who might be tempted to translate them literally in case s/he fails to understand their hidden meaning. Producing accurate translation equivalents for these items cannot be achieved without knowing their metaphorical senses and the ability to provide natural and acceptable equivalents in the target language. The aim is to create a similar impact on the target language audience.

Transl[iter]ating Dubai’s linguistic landscape: a bilingual translation perspective between English and Arabic against a backdrop of globalisation

Abstract As a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary enquiry, linguistic landscape (LL) research can shed light on the sociopolitical, cultural and demographical realities of a particular locale. However, LL research has seldom explored major international cities from a translation and contrastive perspective. Drawing on a corpus containing 450 photographs (e.g. shop fronts and public signs), this study investigates the multilingual landscape involving the Arabic-English pair in Dubai, an international hub representing a vivid case of micro-cosmopolitanism and superdiversity in the 21st century. An examination of the bilingual and translation practices enacted on Dubai’s LL points to a ubiquitous phenomenon that the Arabic information is often not authentic Arabic but transliterations from English (pseudo Arabic in disguise). Such use of transliteration privileges the phonetic transference of sounds, at the expense of meaning and function. The prevalent use of transliteration as a ‘go-to’ strategy is interesting, considering the obvious existence of pure Arabic equivalents. To provide some ethnographic context for the analysis, 10 people in Dubai were interviewed (Arabic speakers from different Arab countries) to establish whether the transliterated Arabic can be understood and the possible rationale behind this interesting linguistic decision. Such symbolic and decorative use of Arabic reflects Dubai’s global city status with immigrants significantly outnumbering the indigenous Arabic-speaking natives. The widespread aesthetic use of ‘Arabised English’ points to the influence of English in a globalised world. Some tentative reasons are provided to explain the phenomenon.

До історії арабського друкарства на Сході: перші арабо-християнські книги, видані у Волощині

The article examines the background of the emergence of printing in Arabic script in the Arab world in the context of its development in Western Europe and attempts of its introduction in the Ottoman Empire. The Arabic-speaking Christians of the Ottoman Empire, especially the Orthodox, who, unlike other denominations, had no support in the outside world were the most interested in the possibility of printing books in Arabic letters for their needs. The implementation of this idea became possible in the early 18th century, due to the fruitful cooperation between the hierarch of the Church of Antioch Athanasios III Dabbas, the prince of Wallachia Constantin Brâncoveanu, and the outstanding printer of Georgian origin Antim the Iberian. The introduction of Arabic printing in Wallachia made it possible to continue this work in Ottoman Syria, where Athanasios III Dabbas printed in 1706 the first book in Arabic script in the Arab world. The paper presents a description of the first two Greek-Arabic prints published in Wallachia – the Liturgikon (1701) and the Horologion (1702), copies of which are kept at the Library of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. In order to identify the linguistic features of the Arabic liturgical texts in the Liturgikon, they were compared with a manuscript version of this book dated 1612. It was concluded that the Wallachian Liturgikon actually reproduced the texts revised by the Metropolitan of Aleppo Meletios Karma (1612–1634) with minor structural, lexical, and grammatical differences. In the printed book there is a noticeable tendency to replace the Greek vocabulary with Arabic equivalents. The reader is offered a Ukrainian translation from Arabic of the prefaces and printer’s notes included in the first book printed for the Orthodox Arabs – the Liturgikon that appeared in 1701 in the Snagov monastery near Bucharest. These texts are the main source of information on the circumstances of the beginning of Arabic printing for the Orthodox Christians.

Morphological Deviations in Arabic Loanwords in Turkish and Their Role in Semantic Ambiguity

Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the phenomena of morphological deviations appear in a subset of Arabic loanwords in Turkish..
 Methods: Methods: The study utilized a comparative analysis approach, which focuses on studying the similarities and differences between two languages from different linguistic families.
 Results: The study found that certain Arabic loanwords in Turkish are not utilized in their original morphological form from Arabic. Turkish deviates from the original morphological structure, resulting in a different form. The study also discovered that these morphological deviations manifest in a few specific forms, and in most cases, they lead to semantic ambiguity. This ambiguity arises as the deviated forms become false cognates with their Arabic equivalents, presenting challenges in language learning and usage.
 Conclusions: The study identified two categories of morphological deviations based on the resulting semantic gap. The first category involves deviations that cause partial semantic confusion, where the deviated and original forms belong to the same semantic domain. The second category encompasses morphological deviations that lead to severe or complete semantic confusion, as the deviated form falls within a different semantic domain compared to the original form.

ADAPTATION IN TRANSLATION: A CASE STUDY OF TRANSFERRING SOME FRENCH PROVERBS INTO ARABIC

The world in which we live is characterized by the multiplicity of languages and cultures, and these various peoples are bound to cohabitation and exchange in all areas of life, especially in light of globalization where the world has become a global village. Hence, translation comes to represent an honest and close bridge to link and consolidate relations between peoples and enhance understanding between each other. Hence the title of this research which reads: Adaptation in translation: a case study of transferring some French proverbs into Arabic. The importance of this research lies in the fact that the world today is in dire need of understanding and integration more than ever before to build a peaceful and developed society. Proverbs represent a core cultural aspect and a distinctive feature that distinguishes each people from another. The problem that emerges from this research is to find the appropriate equivalent for proverbs from one language to another, and precisely for some French proverbs in Arabic language. This research aims, based on the translation technique represented by adaptation, to bring the French culture closer to the Arabic speakers in Cameroon in particular, and to help the Arab reader to understand some of the perceptions in the French culture. It contributes to deepen knowledge for translators and interpreters so they can deliver the message in an optimal way, and then enhance understanding between the speakers of both languages which will help to build an integrated and cohesive society to address the current challenges in our world of today. This article is based - in addition to an introduction and conclusion - on three sections: the first section deals with proverbs from the side of culture and translation, the second section presents selected common and current proverbs in French for study, and the third section analyses the Arabic equivalents of these French proverbs and discusses them based on Arabic culture.

Санскритская философская терминология (karma, sūkṣma, sthūla) в переводе на арабский язык (анализ «Китаб батанджала ал-хинди» ал-Бируни)

The article raises an important but unpopular question of the possibility of translat­ing Sanskrit philosophical terms and concepts into the Arabic language. In modern (and not only) Indological studies, the specifics of translating Sanskrit philosophical vocabulary into the language of the author of the study are somehow affected. A meaningful translation of philosophical texts from Sanskrit into Arabic is rather a rare phenomenon. In the medieval Arabic literature, two such translations made by al-Bīrūnī are known: a paraphrase of the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali and the transla­tion of the Sāṅkhya-kārikā, which is possibly not extant. We will consider a number of the most important philosophical terms in Sanskrit (generally significant for all areas of Indian philosophy) and their Arabic equivalents proposed by al-Bīrūnī. Among such terms, the most significant is the term karma (karman), known to the general public in its vulgar meaning as a kind of return of negativity to the one who was its source. Less well-known are such important pair-functioning ontological concepts as a subtle one (sūkṣma) and gross one (sthūla). The analysis of the Arabic equivalents of the corresponding Sanskrit words proposed by al-Bīrūnī demonstrates the limits of the possibilities of the Arabic philosophical language (we mean the translation precisely, not calcification, transliteration or transcription).

Dominance of Foreign Shop Names Over Arabic Names in Saudi Arabia: Promotional, Sociocultural and Globalization Issues

This article investigates the language choice in shop names in Saudi Arabia, and the factors that determine the language choice and the reasons for preferring English to Arabic names. A sample of 500 shop names in 12 cities was collected from a Saudi Mall Directory and analyzed. In addition, a sample of 75 students and instructors from the departments of languages, translation, education, computer science and business and 25 shop owners and workers were surveyed. It was found that 64% of the shops have foreign names (25% international foreign names and 39% local names); 24% have pure Arabic names and 12% have mixed names. Some shops with a foreign name add an Arabic descriptor which is a translation of the foreign name (Perfume (عطورات بارفيوم. Foreign names are used in some mall and shop names although Arabic equivalents exist. The students, faculty and shop owners and workers gave promotional, sociocultural, linguistic and globalization factors, and lack of a business naming policy. They indicated that foreign shop names are used as a marketing strategy to attract customers who prefer foreign merchandise to local ones. They think it is more glamorous to use a foreign name as foreign names are associated with modernity, prestige, and elitism. They can reach more customers. A foreign name gives the customer the impression that the store is keeping abreast of latest international markets. They faculty added that in our cognition, foreign names are connected with high quality. Our culture looks at English as more sophisticated and fancier. An English name has a different effect. Shop owners indicated that new entrepreneurs adopt a foreign name because they are worried about their ability to compete with other shops. Shops like to Imitate shops in the West. Some think that translating a shop name to Arabic creates a barrier between the customer and the foreign franchised company as the original name is in English. As an example, foreign names are used for promoting the Riyadh Season (Oasis, Winter Wonderland, Park Avenue (بوليفارد . The article gives recommendations for protecting the Arabic language, translating shop names, and choosing glamorous and attractive Arabic names.

Existence of Arabicization Methods for Naturalising Contemporary Technical Vocabularies into the Arabic Language

This research aims at studying Arabicization methods to provide counter knowledge for the overuse of transliterated terms and the abundance of Arabic equivalents for a technical term. It further promotes precise methods on how to Arabicize foreign words in the proper way. For this reason, this qualitative research focuses on studying Arabicization methods in traditional and modern Arabic traditions. The data are collected from several Arabic books, journals, and Arabic language academy reports. For the analysis, the inductive analysis approach is mainly employed to drive the general pattern of Arabicization’s methods through interpretation made from the previous discourse on Arabicization. The research concludes that the conventional vocabulary expanding techniques, including al-ishtiqāq, al-tarjamah, al-qiyās, al-naḥt, and al-majāz, are supposedly less effective and inefficient, while al-dakhīl brings only a few advantages but situating the Arabic language contaminated with numerous peculiar terms. Hence, the four methods of Arabicisation, which involve phonetical naturalisation, morphological naturalisation, filtering, and hybrid Arabicization, are fully considered precise methods. These methods play a crucial role in generating new Arabic technical-technological vocabularies that are mainly a product of the West with all its steps. Arabicisation provides more steps of naturalisation properties that arguably can be the best way to accommodate neologism.

A Corpus-Based Study on the Use of Glossing in Saudi Technology Blogs

This paper investigates the use of glossing in Saudi tech blogs. It contributes to the ongoing discussions on terminology standardization in the Arab world as well as sheds light on translation practices in technology-related fields. More specifically, it seeks to address the interrelationship between current standardization efforts and the use of glossing in Saudi Arabia. In doing so, the paper hopes to answer one main question: How does standardization of technical terminology affects the use of glossing in Saudi technology blogs? A large corpus of 203 texts (mainly reviews of computer-related products) was compiled using two corpus tools (i.e., Wordsmith and Sketch Engine). The texts were divided into two sets, based on the writing style and type of the platform. Then, the electronically retrieved term frequency lists were checked against the Saudi Terminology Data Bank (BASM), a four-language database of standardized technological terms, to determine whether native Arabic equivalents for the glossed terms existed. Three significant trends were identified: 1) bloggers, across the two sets, rarely gloss terms with firmly established Arabic equivalents, 2) informal bloggers used more glossing for terms with standardized—but not commonly used—Arabic forms or opted for non-standardized terms, and 3) glossing yielded high frequencies, across the two sets, for abbreviations exceeding two letters, plus a marked variation in Arabic term use. The marked differences between the two groups were attributed to a variety of factors, including a lagging standardization effort by official bodies.

‘We don’t speak the same language:’ language choice and identity on a Tunisian internet forum

Abstract The linguistic situation in the Arab world is in an important state of transition, with the “spoken” vernaculars increasingly functioning as written languages as well. While this fact is widely acknowledged and the subject of a growing body of qualitative literature, there is little quantitative research detailing the process in action. The current project examines this development as it is occurring in Tunisia: I present the findings from a corpus study comparing the frequency of Tunisian Arabic–Standard Arabic equivalent pairs in online forum posts from 2010 with those from 2021. The findings show that the proportion of Tunisian lexical items, compared to their Standard Arabic equivalents, increased from a minority (19.7%) to a majority (69.9%) over this period. At the same time, metalinguistic comments on the forum reveal that, although its status is still contentious, Tunisian has become unmarked as a written language. These changes can be attributed to major developments in Tunisian society over the period of study – including internet access and the 2011 revolution. These findings suggest destabilization of the diglossic language situation in Tunisia and a privileging of national identity vis-à-vis the rest of the Arab world.

Translation-Adaptation and Transcreation in Netflix English Epi-titles and their Arabic Equivalents (2016-2021): A Pragmatic, Socio-cultural and Socio-cognitive Approach

Translation-Adaptation and Transcreation in Netflix English Epi-titles and their Arabic Equivalents (2016-2021): A Pragmatic, Socio-cultural and Socio-cognitive Approach

A cognitive analysis of war metaphors in English business texts and their Arabic translations

ABSTRACT The main role of metaphor in economic discourse is essential in facilitating our understanding of some business situations or concepts. This article offers a comprehensive analysis of English business war metaphors in their immediate context of use and their Arabic equivalents as they naturally occur in authentic business texts. The data of the study are drawn from business articles on BBC, CNN, Financial Times and Project Syndicate websites. The study departs from the traditional view of metaphor as a linguistic expression that has only an aesthetic value in the text and it examines how metaphors shape our perception of the business world as they express business ideas. The study reveals that Arabic and English business metaphorical expressions share both similar and different cognition modes and hence four strategies of translating English war metaphors into Arabic are discussed: SL war metaphor is rendered into its comparable metaphor in Arabic using literal translation; SL war source domain is shifted into another TL source domain; an English metaphor is toned down into an Arabic non-metaphor and finally an English non-metaphor is shifted into an Arabic metaphor.

Atfi Ahmed Bosnevi's Commentary upon Tuḥfa-i Shāhidī

Based on primary sources and relevant literature, the authors in this paper present the commentary that Atfi Ahmed Bosnevi, an Ottoman author of Bosnian extraction from the first half of the XVIII century, composed upon the celebrated Persian-Ottoman dictionary in verse Tuḥfe-i Shāhidī by Ibrahim-dede Shāhidī. The original work subject to commentary is briefly introduced and analyzed as a significant work in the evolution of Persian lexicography in the Ottoman Empire. However, Atfi's commentary upon Tuḥfe remains in the primary focus of the authors in all relevant aspects: his commentary approach and relation to the original text, his method of commenting as well as the contents of his work revolving around Persian grammar and its tripartite structure according to the traditional Oriental and Arabic linguistic heritage: verbs, nouns, and particle. Although a later addition to the tradition of Tuḥfe commentaries, Atfi’s work ranks among more comprehensive and successful commentaries in which the author strives to preserve the original text from repeated distortions caused to extensive copying, often by non-well-qualified individuals. After furnishing all the necessary information on Ottoman and Persian prosody at the opening of each chapter, Atfi analyzes the Persian lemmata with precious instructions concerning their orthography and pronunciation and their meaning by way of Turkish and Arabic equivalents. The authors conclude that Atfi subjected the original text of Tuhfa to rigorous and thorough philological treatment. Nonetheless, his commentary sometimes feels a bit restrained as Atfi is not particularly keen on widening his commentary out of the contours of the original work even if an occasion calls for it. As a result, his treatment of specific grammatical questions in Persian is selective. His commentary does not function as a combined dictionary and grammar of Persian, and that was not the author’s purpose and motivation for writing his commentary.

Saudi EFL learners’ use of English Modal Verbs: A study of challenges and solutions

It has been reported that English modal verbs can be one of the most difficult grammatical structures to be mastered by EFL learners. Hence, this research aims to explore the reasons behind Saudi EFL students' low proficiency level in using English modal verbs. It also seeks practical solutions for enhancing the students' competency in using them. The study participants are 13 Saudi EFL instructors who are requested to answer an open-ended descriptive question. These responses are then coded thematically to identify the recurring themes. Findings of the study show that the most prominent reasons for students' poor performance in the use of modal verbs are: (i) absence of Arabic equivalents to English modals; (ii) difficulty of English structures; (iii) multiple language functions of English modals; (iv) demotivation of students; (v) use of traditional textbooks and teaching pedagogy. Moreover, the study shows that to increase the Saudi EFL learners’ proficiency in the use of English modals, (i) EFL instructors need to use communicative teaching methodology; (ii) urge students for more practice and; (iii) use suitable textbooks and teaching resources. The study recommends inclusion of the grammar component according to the students’ existing knowledge and explicit teaching.