This study aims to examine the frequency and aspects of cohesive devices such as reference, reiteration and conjunction used in the two literary genres of internet news articles and novels. A contrastive analysis was carried out regarding the way cohe...
This study aims to examine the frequency and aspects of cohesive devices such as reference, reiteration and conjunction used in the two literary genres of internet news articles and novels. A contrastive analysis was carried out regarding the way cohesive devices are used in Korean texts (source text), Arabic texts (target text), which are translated from Korean and non-translated Arabic texts, respectively.
The motivation for this research arose from difficulties translators face during the process of translation in selecting appropriate references and reiteration for indicating the participants and the entities, and determining the most appropriate conjunction in the light of either accuracy or naturalness in translations of Korean texts into Arabic. This paper also delved into the question of whether there are specific prefered cohesive devices according to language and text-type. For this purpose, the present paper, first and foremost, i) offered a description of the linguistic traits of Korean and Arabic; ⅱ) analyzed cohesion aspects of translation based on the systematic functional model by Halliday and Hasan, text linguistics and corpus-based translation studies. With the results of this analysis, this research is aimed at looking into how ‘explicitation’ and ‘normalization’ (or conservatism) were activated from Korean STs into Arabic TTs by shifts and changes of cohesive devices. This paper applied as analysis tools ‘explicitation’ which is a universal strategy used for the process of translation by Bulum-Kulka’s hypothesis and ‘normalization’ which is a tendency to exaggerate features of the target language and to conform to its typical patterns.
In view of the result of analyzing the frequency and aspects of cohesive devices in both genres of news and novels, reiteration has the highest frequency in translated Arabic news articles, on the contrary the frequency of reference is the highest in translated Arabic novels. In translated Arabic texts, the frequency of the reiteration decreased. This is due to Korean texts favoring a high level of nominal repetition, while Arabic texts prefer to make considerable use of pronominal reference. In terms of translation, this is the result of a translator’s decision to sacrifice acceptability for the sake of adequacy by source language-oriented consideration. On the other hand, the frequency of Arabic specific pronominal reference (ذَلِكَ) decreased in litery texts, while it was a predominant divice in translated Arabic news text. Also, the frequency of reiteration of the same word was high in Arabic translated literary texts and it is assumed by the result of interference of source texts.
Regarding explicitation and normalization as universal strategies of translation, the results of the analysis differed according to the text type. In Arabic news translation, an Arabic specific pronominal reference (ذَلِكَ) and conjunction which doesn’t exist in the original text are added, and the ambiguous reference in the original text replaced by announcing it in translation so increased the level of explicitation. Adversely, in Arabic literary translated texts, personal referent which are omitted in the original text are announced by repeating nouns or shifting the repetition of similar words into the repetition of same words. Thus levels of explicitness became high.
Relating to normalization in news translations, the reiteration by the same word is shifted to the same meaning expressions, so the tendancy of Arabic translated news text which prefer various expressions was exaggerated. As for the conjuctive device, a trait arose that tempral conjuctions changed into additive conjunctions. However, participants in literary texts are remarked in the way of shifting nominal reiteration to pronominal reference and also are remarked in the way of causal conjuctions change into the additive conjuctions in the translation text.