Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Arabic translation'

This dissertation presents the first corpus-based system for translation from Arabic text into Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) for the deaf and hearing impaired, for whom it can facilitate access to conventional media and allow communication with hearing people. In addition to the familiar technical problems of text-to-text machine translation,building a system for sign language translation requires overcoming some additional challenges. First,the lack of a standard writing system requires the building of a parallel text-to-sign language corpus from scratch, as well as computational tools to prepare this parallel corpus. Further, the corpus must facilitate output in visual form, which is clearly far more difficult than producing textual output. The time and effort involved in building such a parallel corpus of text and visual signs from scratch mean that we will inevitably be working with quite small corpora. We have constructed two parallel Arabic text-to-ArSL corpora for our system. The first was built from school level language instruction material and contains 203 signed sentences and 710 signs. The second was constructed from a children's story and contains 813 signed sentences and 2,478 signs. Working with corpora of limited size means that coverage is a huge issue. A new technique was derived to exploit Arabic morphological information to increase coverage and hence, translation accuracy. Further, we employ two different example-based translation methods and combine them to produce more accurate translation output. We have chosen to use concatenated sign video clips as output rather than a signing avatar, both for simplicity and because this allows us to distinguish more easily between translation errors and sign synthesis errors. Using leave-one-out cross-validation on our first corpus, the system produced translated sign sentence outputs with an average word error rate of 36.2% and an average position-independent error rate of 26.9%. The corresponding figures for our second corpus were an average word error rate of 44.0% and 28.1%. The most frequent source of errors is missing signs in the corpus; this could be addressed in the future by collecting more corpus material. Finally, it is not possible to compare the performance of our system with any other competing Arabic text-to-ArSL machine translation system since no other such systems exist at present.

[EN] Research on Arabic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Arabic-English Machine Translation (MT) has been usually approached as two independent areas of study. However, the idea of creating one system that combines both areas together, in order to generate English translation out of images containing Arabic text, is still a very challenging task. This process can be interpreted as the translation of Arabic images. In this thesis, we propose a system that recognizes Arabic handwritten text images, and translates the recognized text into English. This system is built from the combination of an HTR system and an MT system. Regarding the HTR system, our work focuses on the use of Bernoulli Hidden Markov Models (BHMMs). BHMMs had proven to work very well with Latin script. Indeed, empirical results based on it were reported on well-known corpora, such as IAM and RIMES. In this thesis, these results are extended to Arabic script, in particular, to the well-known IfN/ENIT and NIST OpenHaRT databases for Arabic handwritten text. The need for transcribing Arabic text is not only limited to handwritten text, but also to printed text. Arabic printed text might be considered as a simple form of handwritten text version. Thus, for this kind of text, we also propose Bernoulli HMMs. In addition, we propose to compare BHMMs with state-of-the-art technology based on neural networks. A key idea that has proven to be very effective in this application of Bernoulli HMMs is the use of a sliding window of adequate width for feature extraction. This idea has allowed us to obtain very competitive results in the recognition of both Arabic handwriting and printed text. Indeed, a system based on it ranked first at the ICDAR 2011 Arabic recognition competition on the Arabic Printed Text Image (APTI) database. Moreover, this idea has been refined by using repositioning techniques for extracted windows, leading to further improvements in Arabic text recognition. In the case of handwritten text, this refinement improved our system which ranked first at the ICFHR 2010 Arabic handwriting recognition competition on IfN/ENIT. In the case of printed text, this refinement led to an improved system which ranked second at the ICDAR 2013 Competition on Multi-font and Multi-size Digitally Represented Arabic Text on APTI. Furthermore, this refinement was used with neural networks-based technology, which led to state-of-the-art results. For machine translation, the system was based on the combination of three state-of-the-art statistical models: the standard phrase-based models, the hierarchical phrase-based models, and the N-gram phrase-based models. This combination was done using the Recognizer Output Voting Error Reduction (ROVER) method. Finally, we propose three methods of combining HTR and MT to develop an Arabic image translation system. The system was evaluated on the NIST OpenHaRT database, where competitive results were obtained.
[ES] El reconocimiento de texto manuscrito (HTR) en árabe y la traducción automática (MT) del árabe al inglés se han tratado habitualmente como dos áreas de estudio independientes. De hecho, la idea de crear un sistema que combine las dos áreas, que directamente genere texto en inglés a partir de imágenes que contienen texto en árabe, sigue siendo una tarea difícil. Este proceso se puede interpretar como la traducción de imágenes de texto en árabe. En esta tesis, se propone un sistema que reconoce las imágenes de texto manuscrito en árabe, y que traduce el texto reconocido al inglés. Este sistema está construido a partir de la combinación de un sistema HTR y un sistema MT. En cuanto al sistema HTR, nuestro trabajo se enfoca en el uso de los Bernoulli Hidden Markov Models (BHMMs). Los modelos BHMMs ya han sido probados anteriormente en tareas con alfabeto latino obteniendo buenos resultados. De hecho, existen resultados empíricos publicados usando corpus conocidos, tales como IAM o RIMES. En esta tesis, estos resultados se han extendido al texto manuscrito en árabe, en particular, a las bases de datos IfN/ENIT y NIST OpenHaRT. En aplicaciones reales, la transcripción del texto en árabe no se limita únicamente al texto manuscrito, sino también al texto impreso. El texto impreso se puede interpretar como una forma simplificada de texto manuscrito. Por lo tanto, para este tipo de texto, también proponemos el uso de modelos BHMMs. Además, estos modelos se han comparado con tecnología del estado del arte basada en redes neuronales. Una idea clave que ha demostrado ser muy eficaz en la aplicación de modelos BHMMs es el uso de una ventana deslizante (sliding window) de anchura adecuada durante la extracción de características. Esta idea ha permitido obtener resultados muy competitivos tanto en el reconocimiento de texto manuscrito en árabe como en el de texto impreso. De hecho, un sistema basado en este tipo de extracción de características quedó en la primera posición en el concurso ICDAR 2011 Arabic recognition competition usando la base de datos Arabic Printed Text Image (APTI). Además, esta idea se ha perfeccionado mediante el uso de técnicas de reposicionamiento aplicadas a las ventanas extraídas, dando lugar a nuevas mejoras en el reconocimiento de texto árabe. En el caso de texto manuscrito, este refinamiento ha conseguido mejorar el sistema que ocupó el primer lugar en el concurso ICFHR 2010 Arabic handwriting recognition competition usando IfN/ENIT. En el caso del texto impreso, este refinamiento condujo a un sistema mejor que ocupó el segundo lugar en el concurso ICDAR 2013 Competition on Multi-font and Multi-size Digitally Represented Arabic Text en el que se usaba APTI. Por otro lado, esta técnica se ha evaluado también en tecnología basada en redes neuronales, lo que ha llevado a resultados del estado del arte. Respecto a la traducción automática, el sistema se ha basado en la combinación de tres tipos de modelos estadísticos del estado del arte: los modelos standard phrase-based, los modelos hierarchical phrase-based y los modelos N-gram phrase-based. Esta combinación se hizo utilizando el método Recognizer Output Voting Error Reduction (ROVER). Por último, se han propuesto tres métodos para combinar los sistemas HTR y MT con el fin de desarrollar un sistema de traducción de imágenes de texto árabe a inglés. El sistema se ha evaluado sobre la base de datos NIST OpenHaRT, donde se han obtenido resultados competitivos.
[CAT] El reconeixement de text manuscrit (HTR) en àrab i la traducció automàtica (MT) de l'àrab a l'anglès s'han tractat habitualment com dues àrees d'estudi independents. De fet, la idea de crear un sistema que combine les dues àrees, que directament genere text en anglès a partir d'imatges que contenen text en àrab, continua sent una tasca difícil. Aquest procés es pot interpretar com la traducció d'imatges de text en àrab. En aquesta tesi, es proposa un sistema que reconeix les imatges de text manuscrit en àrab, i que tradueix el text reconegut a l'anglès. Aquest sistema està construït a partir de la combinació d'un sistema HTR i d'un sistema MT. Pel que fa al sistema HTR, el nostre treball s'enfoca en l'ús dels Bernoulli Hidden Markov Models (BHMMs). Els models BHMMs ja han estat provats anteriorment en tasques amb alfabet llatí obtenint bons resultats. De fet, existeixen resultats empírics publicats emprant corpus coneguts, tals com IAM o RIMES. En aquesta tesi, aquests resultats s'han estès a la escriptura manuscrita en àrab, en particular, a les bases de dades IfN/ENIT i NIST OpenHaRT. En aplicacions reals, la transcripció de text en àrab no es limita únicament al text manuscrit, sinó també al text imprès. El text imprès es pot interpretar com una forma simplificada de text manuscrit. Per tant, per a aquest tipus de text, també proposem l'ús de models BHMMs. A més a més, aquests models s'han comparat amb tecnologia de l'estat de l'art basada en xarxes neuronals. Una idea clau que ha demostrat ser molt eficaç en l'aplicació de models BHMMs és l'ús d'una finestra lliscant (sliding window) d'amplària adequada durant l'extracció de característiques. Aquesta idea ha permès obtenir resultats molt competitius tant en el reconeixement de text àrab manuscrit com en el de text imprès. De fet, un sistema basat en aquest tipus d'extracció de característiques va quedar en primera posició en el concurs ICDAR 2011 Arabic recognition competition emprant la base de dades Arabic Printed Text Image (APTI). A més a més, aquesta idea s'ha perfeccionat mitjançant l'ús de tècniques de reposicionament aplicades a les finestres extretes, donant lloc a noves millores en el reconeixement de text en àrab. En el cas de text manuscrit, aquest refinament ha aconseguit millorar el sistema que va ocupar el primer lloc en el concurs ICFHR 2010 Arabic handwriting recognition competition usant IfN/ENIT. En el cas del text imprès, aquest refinament va conduir a un sistema millor que va ocupar el segon lloc en el concurs ICDAR 2013 Competition on Multi-font and Multi-size Digitally Represented Arabic Text en el qual s'usava APTI. D'altra banda, aquesta tècnica s'ha avaluat també en tecnologia basada en xarxes neuronals, el que ha portat a resultats de l'estat de l'art. Respecte a la traducció automàtica, el sistema s'ha basat en la combinació de tres tipus de models estadístics de l'estat de l'art: els models standard phrase-based, els models hierarchical phrase-based i els models N-gram phrase-based. Aquesta combinació es va fer utilitzant el mètode Recognizer Output Voting Errada Reduction (ROVER). Finalment, s'han proposat tres mètodes per combinar els sistemes HTR i MT amb la finalitat de desenvolupar un sistema de traducció d'imatges de text àrab a anglès. El sistema s'ha avaluat sobre la base de dades NIST OpenHaRT, on s'han obtingut resultats competitius.
Alkhoury, I. (2015). Arabic Text Recognition and Machine Translation [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/53029
TESIS

The term equivalence describes the relationship between a translation and the text from which it is translated. Translation is generally viewed as indeterminate insofar as there is no single acceptable translation - but many. Despite this, the rationalist metaphor of translation equivalence prevails. Rationalist approaches view translation as a process in which an original text is analysed to a level of abstraction, then transferred into a second representation from which a translation is generated. At the deepest level of abstraction, representations for analysis and generation are identical and transfer becomes redundant, while at the surface level it is said that surface textual features are transferred directly. Such approaches do not provide a principled explanation of how or why abstraction takes place in translation. They also fail to resolve the dilemma of specifying the depth of transfer appropriate for a given translation task. By focusing on the translator�s role as mediator of communication, equivalence can be understood as the coordination of information about situations and states of mind. A fundamental opposition is posited between the transfer of rule-like or codifiable aspects of equivalence and those non-codifiable aspects in which salient information is coordinated. The Translation Salience model proposes that Transfer and Salience constitute bipolar extremes of a continuum. The model offers a principled account of the translator�s interlingual attunement to multi-placed coordination, proposing that salient information can be accounted for with three primary notions: markedness, implicitness and localness. Chapter Two develops the Translation Salience model. The model is supported with empirical evidence from published translations of Arabic and English texts. Salience is illustrated in Chapter Three through contextualized interpretations associated with various Arabic communication resources (repetition, code switching, agreement, address in relative clauses, and the disambiguation of presentative structures). Measurability of the model is addressed in Chapter Four with reference to emerging computational techniques. Further research is suggested in connection with theme and focus, text type, cohesion and collocation relations.

Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2013.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study investigates the feasibility of translating the Arabic Qur’an into isiXhosa. The Qur’an has not yet been translated into isiXhosa and Xhosa-speaking Muslims who are unable to read and understand Arabic are facing a void in practising their faith. Xhosa-speaking Muslims also pray in a language that they do not understand and this robs them of close contact with the Almighty and as a result, the number of Muslims who speak isiXhosa does not increase. Through literature reviews and interviews it has been found that there is a great need for Muslims, who are target language speakers, to be able to communicate with Allah in their mother tongue, isiXhosa. Furthermore the study indicated that isiXhosa-speaking Muslims who, years ago, have converted to Islam are still struggling with the Arabic language. This study also investigates the view that the Arabic Qur’an cannot be translated into other languages because the Qur’an is the word of God delivered in Arabic to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). This view is not based upon the assumption that an Arabic Qur’an is untranslatable, but rather on the views of some Arabic scholars. There are also fears that meaning will be lost when the Qur’an is translated. However, the study showed that when translating the Qur’an, one is not seeking to translate only the meaning but also the message of the Qur’an. A conclusion was reached that all human beings, thus all nations and languages, are created by Allah. Therefore, it is acceptable for human beings to communicate and listen to Allah’s message in their own language. This study suggests that culture and language are inseparable and that both must be taken into consideration when translating. The Qur’an has already been translated into other languages and the translations are used without any problems, for example into English and KiSwahili. The Qur’an is available in other African languages as well. Therefore, this study suggests that the Qur’an can be translated into isiXhosa. The linguistic challenges can be addressed in the target language by a body consisting of translators of laypersons, translation experts and linguists specialising in both Xhosa and Arabic. However, the study shows that the title of the Xhosa Qur’an should indicate that the Qur’an is a translated text.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die studie ondersoek die vertaling van die Arabiese Koran na Xhosa. Die Koran is nie tans in Xhosa beskikbaar nie en Xhosa-sprekende Moslems wat nie Arabies magtig is nie, ervaar dit as ’n struikelblok in die beoefening van hul geloof. Xhosa-sprekende Moslems bid ook in Arabies, selfs al verstaan hulle nie die taal nie. Dit beroof hulle van noue kontak met die Almagtige en veroorsaak dat die Moslem-geloof nie by Xhosa-sprekers in townships inslag vind nie. Aan die hand van ’n literatuurstudie en onderhoude is bevind dat daar ’n groot behoefte onder Xhosa-sprekende Moslems is om in hul moedertaal met Allah te kommunikeer. Die studie het ook getoon dat Xhosa-sprekende Moslems wat hulle reeds jare gelede tot die Islam bekeer het, steeds met die Arabiese taal worstel. Die studie ondersoek ook die siening dat die Koran nie vertaal mag word nie, omdat die Woord van God in Arabies aan die profeet Mohammed (mag vrede oor hom heers) geopenbaar is. Dié siening berus nie op die aanname dat die Koran onvertaalbaar is nie, maar eerder op die uitsprake van Arabiese geleerdes. Daar word ook gevrees dat die Koran se betekenis verlore sal gaan tydens die vertaalproses. Die studie toon egter dat die vertaling van die Koran sal fokus op die oordrag van die boodskap en nie net die betekenis van woorde nie. Die gevolgtrekking van die ondersoek is dat alle mense, en dus alle volke en tale, deur Allah geskep is. Dit is dus aanvaarbaar vir mense om Allah se boodskap in hul eie taal te kommunikeer en aan te hoor. Die studie kom tot die gevolgtrekking dat taal en kultuur onskeidbaar is en dat albei in ag geneem moet word tydens die vertaalproses. Die Koran is reeds in ander tale vertaal en word sonder enige probleme gebruik, byvoorbeeld in Engels en Swahili. Die Koran is ook in ander Afrika-tale beskikbaar. Die studie bevind dus dat die Koran ook in Xhosa vertaal kan word. Die taalkundige uitdagings kan in die doeltaal hanteer word deur ’n vertaalspan wat bestaan uit leke, opgeleide vertalers en taalkundiges wat spesialiseer in Xhosa en Arabies. Die studie toon egter dat die titel van die Xhosa Koran moet aandui dat dit ’n vertaalde teks is.
I-ABSTRAKTHI: Olu phando luphande ukuba nako kokuguqulelwa esiXhoseni kweKurani yesi-Arabhu. Uphando lubangelwe kukuba kungekho Kurani iguqulelwe esiXhoseni okwangoku kwaye kuqwalaseleke ukuba aMaslamsi athetha isiXhosa, angayiqondiyo nangaluvayo ulwimi lwesi-Arabhu, nokuba afundile okanye awafundanga, ajongene nomngeni wokuba nokungoneliseki kwinkolo yabo. Inyaniso yokuba kufuneka athandaze ngolwimi angaluqondiyo, ibenza bangakwazi ukufikelela kuQamata kwaye ngenxa yoko, inani laMaslamsi alandi kwiilokishi apho aMaslamsi athetha isiXhosa. Uphando, ngokuphonononga iincwadi nangokubamba udliwano-ndlebe, lufumanise ukuba kukhona isikhalo esikhulu esisuka kuMaslamsi athetha ulwimi okujoliswe kulo ukuze akwazi ukunxibelelana noQamata ngolwimi aluqonda ngcono, olusisiXhosa. Uphando lubonise ukuba aMaslamsi athetha isiXhosa awaguqukelanga kwinkolo ye-Islamu kutsha nje kwaye umzabalazo wolwimi kudala uqhubeka. Uphando luxoxe ngoluvo lokuba iKurani yolwimi lwesi-Arabhu ayinakuze iguqulelwe kwezinye iilwimi njengoko iKurani ililizwi likaQamata eladluliswa ngolwimi lwesi-Arabhu kuMprofeti uMuhammada (uxolo malube naye). Uphando lungqine ukuba uluvo lokuba iKurani yolwimi lwesi-Arabhu ayinakuguqulelwa kwezinye iilwimi alusekelwanga ekungaguqulweni kombhalo kodwa kwizimvo zezifundiswa zama-Arabhu. Uphando kananjalo luxoxe ngomba wokuba uloyiko lokuguqulela iKurani yolwimi lwesi-Arabhu kwezinye iilwimi lubangelwa yinyaniso yokuba xa kuguqulelwa, kuye kubekho ukulahleka nokulahlekwa kwentsingiselo pha naphaya. Uphando slubonise ukuba xa kuguqulelwa iKurani, ubani akasobe efuna ukuguqulela intsingiselo kodwa umyalezo weKurani. Uphando lufikelele kwisigqibo sokuba abantu bazizidalwa zikaQamata kwaye badalwe bazizizwe ngezizwe nokuba bathethe iilwimi ngeelwimi. Ngoko ke, kwamkelekile ukuba abantu banxibelelane ze bamamele umyalelo kaQamata kulwimi olulolwabo. Uphando lufikelela esigqibeni sokuba inkcubeko nolwimi azohlukani kwaye ngexesha lokuguqulela, zombini (inkcubeko nolwimi) kufuneka zibe ziyaqwalaselwa. Uphando lubonise ukuba iKurani yaguqulelwa kwezinye iilwimi kwaye iinguqulelo zisetyenziswa ngaphandle kwengxaki. Imizekelo yeenguqulelo ziiKurani kwisiNgesi nakwisiSwahili. Uphando lubonise kananjalo ukuba zikhona ezinye iinguqulelo zeKurani kwiilwimi zase-Afrika. Ngoko ke, uphando lufikelele kwisigqibo sokuba iKurani ingaguqulelwa kulwmi lwesiXhosa kwaye nayiphina imingeni yenzululwazi yolwimi engathi ivele ingasonjululwa kulwimi ekujoliswe kulo luphando, ukuba kunokuthi umntu ongathi aguqulele ingabi nguye nawuphi na umntu ontetho isisiXhosa owazi ulwimi lwesi-Arabhu kwaye eliSlamsi, koko ibe yibhodi yokuguqulela eya kuthi ibe nabantu abohlukeneyo ngokwamanqanaba abo, ukusuka kulowo ungafundanga, iincutshe zokuguqulela, iingcali zolwimi kwiilwimi zombini. Nangona kunjalo, kuphando kuye kwaqwalaselwa ukuba iKurani eguqulelweyo ayinakubizwa ngokuba yiKurani kodwa mayibizwe ngegama elibonisa nelicebisa ukuba umbhalo lowo yinguqulelo.

This thesis investigates translation problems in translating from English to Arabic. Despite the fact that there are some taxonomies available, none is based on empirical research; moreover, none can be considered comprehensive. The present study provides a ranked taxonomy of problems in translating from English to Arabic that was developed through two empirical studies. The first is a case-study of the researcher translating a published corpus of short translation-class texts. Since the aim of this project is pedagogical, students of translation were the target population of the second multi-subject study. Here, 56 undergraduate and 18 postgraduate students in Arabic —+ English translation classes at Al-Fateh University and the Academy of Graduate Studies in Libya translated a sub-set of the same texts. By comparing the two groups' performance, the researcher could also find out the effects of translation experience/proficiency on the type and severity of problems. The taxonomy consists of four levels: supra, main, sub and sub-sub categories. The supra category includes problems of ST Comprehension and TT Production and problems of Transfer Process. The main category includes Micro-Language problems, Macro-Text level problems and Strategies and Techniques problems. The sub-category includes problems of Grammar, Vocabulary, Spelling, Rhetorical and stylistic devices, Cohesion, Register and style, Background Knowledge and Culture. The sub-sub categories include forty seven categories such as problems of Word order, Fixed Expressions, Spelling Slips, Irony, Omission and Additions. A tentative ranking of the difficulty of problems is based on three factors: perceived difficulty, error count and error severity. What distinguishes the taxonomy formulated in the present study from existing ones is comprehensiveness, e.g. in combining problems of ST comprehension, TT production and problems of transfer process, or in combining problems of the language system and extra-textual problems; and the ranking adds another dimension. The thesis consists of six chapters: Chapter One outlines the theme of the project and presents the research questions. Chapter Two reviews the relevant literature with an emphasis on translation problems and errors. Chapter Three presents the researcher case-study which sets the ground for the multi-subject main-study in Chapter Four. Chapter Five provides a model of English —* Arabic translation problems as exemplified by the taxonomy of translation problems and discusses the ranking system used and its outcome. Chapter Six, Conclusion, evaluates the outcome of the study, assesses the methodology that has been used to investigate the issues set in the research questions and discusses implications for further research.

This thesis is concerned with a particularly problematic area of Arabic-English translation, an activity likely to expand considerably as this century continues, and especially in non-literary domains. The past decade has seen increasing attention being paid by translation and other scholars to such issues as ideology, intervention, the role of narratives and the involvement of translation in global news dissemination. Not surprisingly, translation from Arabic looms large in all these areas. Political speeches and statements, often containing a disconcertingly unfamiliar blend of political and religious discourse, invite or require translation (or summary) into English by various agencies with their own particular ideological stances and agenda. Even with accurate and competent linguistic transfer there are many forms of possible manipulation. Equally, poor quality translation between two such incongruent languages can easily produce material that appears at least partly incomprehensible and may tend to make the source text and its producer(s) seem ridiculous to the target reader. Examples of this abound in the available translations of two of Saddam Hussein's speeches in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. To prepare the ground for an examination of these translations, this study first traces the history of ideas about translation and the development of the modem `interdiscipline' of Translation Studies. It then moves on to consider the problems of equivalence and translatability in Arabic-English translation, not only at the word and sentence level but also at that of whole texts, and extends this enquiry into the area of textuality and especially the phenomenon of intertextuality. Intertextuality is then seen to be carried within languages and cultures by the vehicle of ideology and discourse, and thus to represent a particular challenge to translators. Problems in the translation of the Saddam speeches are subsequently identified and discussed in the context of target reader norms and expectations, and in terms of a still rather hazy notion of `communicative equivalence

This work springs from the subjective need for limiting the translation bias. It has been noticed that a considerable amount of translation is allowed to be published and read mainly due to the importance of its readability in the target language and often overlooking the goal(s) of the source text. This seems to derive from two common presumptions: (1) That a text goal is the result of an irretrievable and indescribable intentionality and (2) That target text readability and the preservation of the source text goal are two incompatible goals of translation. And this is in turn the result of the long lived dichotomy of translation studies into literal and free or text-based and reader oriented approaches. This work attempts to show that both (I) and (2) are misconceptions. Given a reasonable characterisation, intentionality is retrievable from the text itself and revealing of the text goal, the preservation of which does not exclude the readability of the TT and vice versa. Based on pragmatic insights drawn mainly from the Gricean Maxims and Cooperative Principle, Speech Act theory and the Text Linguistic model, this work proceeds to argue the case by analysing three Arabic texts and their twenty-two translations (each text is translated seven to eight times by different translators). These are of three most common types of prose: the expository, the argumentative and the instructive types. The analysis revolves around the identification of the text goal in the SL and its preservation in the TL. During this process a number of models and theories that constitute a controversial view of intentionality are outlined and discussed with a view to breaking the polarity they form and finding a medium path that is apt for charting more plausibly the context, the text and the process of translation. It is hoped that the implications of such work will help improve the quality of translation, provide a more explicit and plausible contribution to the account for the process and to further the effort towards standardising the theory.

La traduction automatique de texte arabe a reçu beaucoup d'attention au cours de la dernière décennie. La langue arabe, langue officielle de plus de 25 pays, est parlée par plus de 290 millions de personnes. Les changements politiques engendrés par les révolutions arabes ont mis sur le devant de la scène cette langue et ses multiples dialectes. Ce travail s'inscrit dans le cadre du projet BOLT dont le but est d'améliorer les performances des systèmes de traduction arabe-anglais pour des domaines spécifiques (SMS, parole conversationnelle, etc.)Dans cette thèse, j'ai enrichi le système de traduction à base de segments du LIUM à maints égards. Les systèmes à base de segments fournissent actuellement les meilleures performances. Ces systèmes sont basés sur deux modèles statistiques : le modèle de traduction et le modèle de langage. Dans l'objectif d’améliorer la qualité de traduction de l'arabe, nous avons mis l'accent sur trois aspects. Le premier aspect est la réduction des mots inconnus dans la sortie de traduction. Le second aspect de mon travail de thèse est l'adaptation au domaine ou à la tâche de la table de traduction. Finalement, je me suis intéressé à l'amélioration de la modélisation linguistique avec des réseaux de neurones. Ces modèles sont utilisés pour re-évaluer les n-meilleures hypothèses de traduction.Toutes les techniques développées ont été minutieusement incorporées dans le système du LIUM et évaluées dans trois campagnes d’évaluation internationales dans le cadre du projet BOLT
The Arabic language received a lot of attention in the machine translation community during the last decade. It is the official language of 25 countries and it is spoken by more than 380 million people. The interest in Arabic language and its dialects increased more after the Arab spring and the political change in the Arab countries. In this thesis, I worked on improving LIUM's machine translation system for Arabic-English in the frame-work of the BOLT project.In this thesis, I have extend LIUM's phrase-based statistical machine translation system in many ways. Phrase-based systems are considered to be one of the best performing approaches. Basically, two probabilistic models are used, a translation model and a language model.I have been working on improving the translation quality. This is done by focusing on three different aspects. The first aspect is reducing the number of unknown words in the translated output. Second, the entities like numbers or dates that can be translated efficiently by some transfer rules. Finally, I have been working on the transliteration of named entities. The second aspect of my work is the adaptation of the translation model to the domain or genre of the translation task.Finally, I have been working on improved language modeling, based on neural network language models, also called continuous space language models. They are used to rescore the n-best translation hypotheses.All the developed techniques have been thoroughly evaluated and I took part in three international evaluations of the BOLT project

The research examined the relationships between the morphological structures and features of Arabic and English verbs. An examination of the corpus in the research, which compiled 2000 verbs and their translation from various texts, showed that correlation between verb aspects are minimal. Therefore it is admissible to say that there is no correlation between morphological aspects and categories of Arabic and English verbs. Through analysis of Arabic verb patterns, the research demonstrated the primacy of a morpheme as one of the significant linguistic structural units that incorporates semantic and syntactic features, and also as a pivotal translation unit. The data analysis also signified that genre variation in Arabic is well established and can be clearly identified through morphological aspects of the verb and their distribution in text types.
Master of Arts (Hons)

Literary translation is the result of the interaction of culture, ideology and translation. It is also considered to be one of the most interesting challenges within a specific literary system due to its special nature and the variation in the cultural environment between source and target. Researching such challenges entails investigating the different factors that govern the translation process and product alongside its reception by a specific readership. This thesis is located within the framework of translation studies suggested by Holmes (1988) and developed by Toury (1995), as partly descriptive and partly process-reception oriented. It employs empirical interviews to investigate and describe the different economic, political, cultural and ideological factors that govern the translation process and product in Syria. Such a description provides the background for the assessment of the responses of groups of target readers to a specific text. In this research, D. H. Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gipsy and two Arabic translations are used as a sample analysis of the translation procedures adopted to tackle culturespecific references. The manual analysis in Chapter 5 of the cultural references in The Virgin and the Gipsy leads to the conclusion that translation procedures adopted in the published translations are unsystematic and that the two translators may not be fully aware of the effects of the chosen procedures on their target readers. The empirical methods are twofold. Interviews were carried out with Syrian publishers to explore the Syrian publishing conditions. The results yield a description of the sociocultural context of translation in Syria. Within that context, the responses of particular groups of target readers (English Literature graduates) to certain translation procedures are examined and then used to investigate the acceptability of the procedures used mainly endnotes and interpolations based on the students' responses to them. Four questionnaires were conducted with forty Syrian students. The results show that endnotes and interpolations are acceptable translation procedures in translating certain culture-specific references, depending on the needs of target readers and the importance of the cultural reference in understanding the text. This research demonstrates the potential of using reader-response theory and methods in analysing translation procedures that are adopted to deal with culture-specific references The results suggest that extensions and modifications of empirical models are necessary to gauge target readers' responses and to show how such enquiries can be used in translation studies.

Current research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tends to exploit corpus resources as a way of overcoming the problem of knowledge acquisition. Statistical analysis of corpora can reveal trends and probabilities of occurrence, which have proved to be helpful in various ways. Machine Translation (MT) is no exception to this trend. Many MT researchers have attempted to extract knowledge from parallel bilingual corpora. The MT problem is generally decomposed into two sub-problems: lexical selection and reordering of the selected words. This research addresses the problem of lexical selection of open-class lexical items in the framework of MT. The work reported in this thesis investigates different methodologies to handle this problem, using a corpus-based approach. The current framework can be applied to any language pair, but we focus on Arabic and English. This is because Arabic words are hugely ambiguous and thus pose a challenge for the current task of lexical selection. We use a challenging Arabic-English parallel corpus, containing many long passages with no punctuation marks to denote sentence boundaries. This points to the robustness of the adopted approach. In our attempt to extract lexical equivalents from the parallel corpus we focus on the co-occurrence relations between words. The current framework adopts a lexicon-free approach towards the selection of lexical equivalents. This has the double advantage of investigating the effectiveness of different techniques without being distracted by the properties of the lexicon and at the same time saving much time and effort, since constructing a lexicon is time-consuming and labour-intensive. Thus, we use as little, if any, hand-coded information as possible. The accuracy score could be improved by adding hand-coded information. The point of the work reported here is to see how well one can do without any such manual intervention. With this goal in mind, we carry out a number of preprocessing steps in our framework. First, we build a lexicon-free Part-of-Speech (POS) tagger for Arabic. This POS tagger uses a combination of rule-based, transformation-based learning (TBL) and probabilistic techniques. Similarly, we use a lexicon-free POS tagger for English. We use the two POS taggers to tag the bi-texts. Second, we develop lexicon-free shallow parsers for Arabic and English. The two parsers are then used to label the parallel corpus with dependency relations (DRs) for some critical constructions. Third, we develop stemmers for Arabic and English, adopting the same knowledge -free approach. These preprocessing steps pave the way for the main system (or proposer) whose task is to extract translational equivalents from the parallel corpus. The framework starts with automatically extracting a bilingual lexicon using unsupervised statistical techniques which exploit the notion of co-occurrence patterns in the parallel corpus. We then choose the target word that has the highest frequency of occurrence from among a number of translational candidates in the extracted lexicon in order to aid the selection of the contextually correct translational equivalent. These experiments are carried out on either raw or POS-tagged texts. Having labelled the bi-texts with DRs, we use them to extract a number of translation seeds to start a number of bootstrapping techniques to improve the proposer. These seeds are used as anchor points to resegment the parallel corpus and start the selection process once again. The final F-score for the selection process is 0.701. We have also written an algorithm for detecting ambiguous words in a translation lexicon and obtained a precision score of 0.89.

This thesis investigates the practices of Arabic localisation as it presents a neglected area of localisation research, localising to a developing market. The thesis aims to establish a connection between localisation and Translation Studies, by exploring the ways in which this area can be theorised starting from the approaches developed by Lawrence Venuti (in particular the notions of foreignisation and domestication), and Christiane Nord (translation as interpersonal activity). Creating a theoretical framework which marries the cultural turn and functionalist approaches helps address the dynamics of Arabic localisation on both micro and macro levels. The thesis also aims to provide a holistic view of Arabic localisation, by considering translation processes and outcomes, and by attempting to understand how Arabic localisation is perceived by its target audience. In order to achieve these goals, the thesis presents three case studies devoted, respectively, to the FIFA 15 video game, the Knorr website and the educational platform Blackboard Learn. It follows a mixed method approach to answer about the unique nature of each case study. This includes text analysis which covers each medium’s localisation literature, the Arabic translated content of the selected products and related business articles. In addition, relevant online materials, such as gaming fora and Youtube gaming channels, are analysed to assess the response of the FIFA and Knorr target audience to the translation they receive. Due to the privacy of Blackboard Learn’s content and users, access to a student’s and an instructor’s accounts were sought from an Arabic university, and a questionnaire was developed to assess quantitatively and qualitatively the Arabic users’ response to the platform’s Arabic localisation. The significance of this thesis lies in its methodology and findings. Employing strategies from a range of backgrounds, academic, professional and social, produces a novel methodology for translation research and for addressing the complexity of the discipline of localisation, as well as understanding the effect of its technical and commercial aspects on translation practices and outcomes. By approaching localisation from a Translation Studies perspective, the thesis contributes to both disciplines. The thesis highlights the ways in which localising to a developing market is different from many of the practices discussed in the localisation literature. In addition, the context of Arabic localisation proves to be a fertile ground where Venuti’s theory of foreignisation and domestication can be relocated, and the debate about it acquires new nuances.

As yet, few explicit, practical and easy to implement marking scales for evaluating the quality of translations have been proposed. The purpose of this study is to introduce a new marking guide for making quantitative assessments of the quality of non-literary translations, and to test its practicality through a case study using the Arabic language. On the basis of the results, some generalizations about translation and translation quality assessment are made. Early treatments which dealt with the evaluation of translations are discussed, showing their merits and defects. The new marking guide is then described, including classification of errors and examples of each type of error. Guidelines are presented for the holistic subjective assessment, the guidelines are evaluated and the outcome discussed
Master of Arts (Hons)

Translation evaluation is one of the main concerns of translation theorists, members of translation revision boards, and most importantly it is the concern of translator trainers. Translation quality has often been associated with the correctness of the grammatical structure and the appropriateness of the lexical item. Little concern has empirically been given to units larger than the sentence, i.e. text. This seems to be the result of the prevailing linguistic trend that has put more emphasis on a -context-free' sentence, rather than on text in context. This study proposes to investigate, discuss and develop a translation quality assessment model that takes text, not a sentence as the ultimate aim of analysis. The study will also attempt to explore the theoretical and practical implications of the model to be developed for the training of translators in the Arab world. The model to be developed should be based on the definition that translation is the replacement of a text in the source language by a semantically, pragmatically and textually equivalent text in the target language. Text, then, is the focus of interest in this study. Therefore, the model will be developed within the framework of text lingui4Vics for which text is regarded as a communicative occurrence. The developed model will serve as a means to evaluating the quality of Arabic-English translations of a particular type of texts, argumentative text type. Therefore, two argumentative texts in the form of newspaper editorials, selected from two Moroccan quality newspapers will be analyzed along the dimensions of what will be known in this study as a Situational/Textual model. The resultant "textual profile" will, then, be taken as a "yardstick" against which will be measured 81 translations collected from Fand School of Advanced Translation (FST) and 5 from the department of modern languages, Salford University (SU). The first introductory chapter lays out the main arguments of the thesis. Chapters two and three present and discuss sentence-oriented translation models, and text-oriented translation models respectively. Chapter four presents and discusses the following: a) the three aspects of meaning: semantic, pragmatic, and textual, b) language function vs. text function, and finally C) House's (1981) model of translation quality assessment. Chapter five presents the method of operation, discusses the decision criteria needed to deal with the dimensions linguistic correlates, and finally illustrates the extended situational/textual model for translation quality assessment. Chapter six is the application of the model on the two Arabic argumentative texts. In addition, argumentative text structure will be discussed and the difference between Arabic and English argumentative texts will be explained. Finally, chapter seven includes the source language text (SLT), and the target language text (TLT) statement of comparison and statement of quality, and a discussion of the theoretical implication of the model for the training of translators in the Arab world.

How does localized translation relate to the Arabic language? According to the Localization Industry Standards Association, localization “involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language) where it will be used and sold,” (Esselink 2000a, p. 3). In monoglossic situations, localized translation involves producing translations that reflect regional language variation. Localizing Arabic translations presents a greater challenge because the Arabic language is characterized by both register variation and regional variation (Badawi 1973/2012; Bassiouney 2009; Ferguson 1959/1972). Existing literature addresses both localized translation and Arabic translation, but does not address localized Arabic translation specifically. Within the field of outcomes research, a public health subfield that studies patient populations health and well-being, prior studies that analyze Arabic translations of outcomes research documentation focus solely on the validity of universal, not localized translations. Studies in other specialized fields such as law also fail to include analysis of localized Arabic translation. This study analyzes register and regional variation in one universal and twenty-seven localized Arabic translations of the Work Productivity and Activity Impairment Questionnaire (WPAI), a clinical outcome assessment that is frequently localized for use in internationally sited clinical trials (Margaret Reilly Associates 2013). To determine the degree to which the Arabic WPAIs are localized, twenty-one variables including linguistic lexical items, morphological forms, and syntactic structures were coded as either salient Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or localized. Localized variables include salient Levantine Arabic (LA), Gulf Arabic (GA), and Egyptian Arabic (EA) features, shared MSA/LA/GA/EA variables and simplified variables. Then residual analysis of the expected and observed frequencies of each variable determined the overall degree of localization for each variable. Results indicate that salient MSA variables and localized variables are used in all twenty-eight WPAIs while localized salient LA, GA, and EA variables are completely absent. Although the inconsistent use of localized shared and simplified variables throughout the one universal and twenty-seven L-, G-, and E-WPAIs indicates that localization standards are met inconsistently, all twenty-eight WPAIs are successful within a functionalist framework because the use of salient MSA, shared, and simplified variables ensures that the text is accessible to a lay audience, which is the ultimate function of the target text (TT). This study sheds light on the inherent challenges of localized Arabic translation, which is caught between localization standards and Arabic language norms. Motivations for using salient MSA, shared, and simplified variables are discussed and implications of this study include improving methods for producing localized Arabic translations.

This research claims to differ from previous researches undertaken on collocations in that it considers collocations from the point of view of translation. It tackles analytically the problems of translating English collocations into Arabic, and succinctly traces the possible solutions embodied in the translational strategies. It is universally admitted by linguists and translation theoreticians that the domain of translation is very thorny. Therefore, knowing which lexical items go together, i.e. intercollocate, is an important part of understanding the text and translating it appropriately. The strategies that this research aspires to highlight include: substitutability, expansion, contraction, transposability, predictability, and cohesion. However, considerable discussion has been devoted to each strategy separately, illuminating the different possibilities with which each strategy may be manipulated. Examples have been systematically and extensively chosen covering two significant areas: first, those extracted from English-Arabic bilingual dictionaries; and second, those chosen from Modem Standard Arabic and, in particular, the Arab Press. This presents the miscellaneous problems of rendering collocations, which follow the discussion of these strategies. Collocation is defined in this thesis as ''the frequent co-occurrence of lexical items that naturally share the characteristics of semantic and grammatical dependencies". This definition, as will be seen in Chapter I, characterises the discrepancy between collocation and non-collocation; and demarcates the features of collocational ties that are basic to the process of their transference. A review elaborating areas indispensable for understanding collocations such as kinds of collocations and meaning by collocations, among other relating issues, is carried out as will be seen in Chapter II. The translation of lexical collocations, i.e. those being recorded in English-Arabic bilingual dictionaries, is examined and assessed in the light of the translational strategies that are mentioned above, as will be seen in Chapters III and IV. The translation of non-lexical collocations, i.e. those not yet recorded in English-Arabic bilingual dictionaries, and which can be traced back to English collocations, is also examined and assessed in the light of these translational strategies. I have named them neo-collocations, that is those invented by the Arab Press and often not yet having gained circulation among Arab readers as will be seen in Chapters V and VI. The main contribution of this research is, however, the manipulability of these translation strategies in giving natural and acceptable Arabic equivalents to English collocations, and in particular cases when there are no TL equivalents. This highlights the possibilities of transferring collocations as either collocations or non-collocations.

Translation quality assessment remains pertinent in both translation theory and in the industry. Specifically, the process of assessing a target document's quality or a person's translation competence involves a lot of time and money on the part of various governments, organizations and individuals. In response to this issue, this project builds on the ongoing research of Hague et al. (2012), who seek to determine the capabilities of a computerized translation test for the French-to-English and Spanish-to-English language pairs. Specifically, Hague et al. (2012) question whether a good score on a detect-and-correct style computerized translation test that is calculated by a computer also indicates a good score on a traditional full translation test that is calculated by hand. This project seeks to further this research by seeking to answer the same question using an Arabic-to-English language pair. The methods used in this research involve testing individuals using two different style translation tests and then comparing the results. The first style translation test involves a detect-and-correct format where a subject is given a list of project specifications in the form of a translation brief, a source text passage and a corresponding target text passage that has errors introduced throughout. The subject is expected to detect and fix the errors while leaving the rest of the text alone. A score is given for this test using an automated algorithm. The second style test is a traditional translation test where a subject is given the same translation brief and a source text. The subject is expected to produce an acceptable target text, which is subsequently scored by hand. Thereafter, various forms of analysis are used to determine the relationship between the scores of the two types of tests. The results of this research do not strongly suggest that a high score on the detect-and-correct portion of the test indicates a high score on a hand-graded full translation test for the subject population used. However, this research still provides insight, especially concerning whether the detect-and-correct portion of the test actually measures translation competence and concerning second language acquisition (SLA) programs and their intentions. In addition, this research provides insight into logistical issues in testing such as the impact text difficulty and length may have on a detect-and-correct style test as well as the negative impact the American Translators Association (ATA) grading practices of weighting errors and capping errors can have on an experiment such as the one described in this research.

La traductologie fait depuis quelques années une entrée timide dans le Monde arabe et c’est notamment la traduction de la terminologie de cette discipline qui joue un rôle prépondérant à ce niveau-là. Or, s’il est parfois réussi, le passage terminologique se heurte souvent à des difficultés, voire des impasses. A travers l’analyse des termes arabes de la traductologie, c’est-à-dire à travers l’étude de leur construction, fonctionnement, circulation, évolution, etc., l’on peut d’une part, s’interroger sur le rapport parfois problématique de ces termes, et des idées qu’ils subsument, avec leurs origines étrangères, et d’autre part, révéler les temps forts, mais surtout les limites d’un tel passage, pour faire surgir l’état plus général de la réflexion arabe sur la traduction
In the last few years, translation studies have been growing slowly in the Arab World, a new phenomenom in which the translation of the French and English terminology of the discipline plays a crucial role. However, this transfer can have its successes as well as its setbacks. Through the study of the Arabic terms of translation studies, i.e. their creation, circulation, evolution, etc., it is possible, on one hand, to examin the relationship between the terms, and the ideas underlying them, and their outside influences, and, on another hand, to reveal the limits of this transfer, in order to describe the general state of translation studies in the Arab World

This thesis has three goals: to identify patterns of repetition in the Arab writers Taha Hussein’s and Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s texts, their shift in the English translations, and to establish the translation strategies used in this area. The empirical base material for this study consists of a three-part autobiography (al-Ayyaam, ‘The Days’) and a narrative fiction (Hadiith ‘Isaa ibn Hishaam, ‘Isa ibn Hisham’s Tale’). As a first step Taha Hussein and Muhammad al-Muwaylihi along with their texts are presented and criteria for selecting research material discussed. Secondly, the notion of repetition is explored from the perspective of linguistic and cultural norms, and issues related to the norm theories discussed. Lastly, a comparative analysis is carried out in five chapters to see how instances of repetition are rendered in the English translations. The findings show that Arabic texts utilise repetitive patterns for text-building and rhetorical purposes. These patterns are manifested, on all levels, in phonological, morphological and lexical repetition, lexical doublets paraphrase, parallelism and chiasmus. A stereoscopic type of lexical doublet cements textual cohesion and coherence by signalling complex meaning that goes beyond the confines of the doublet. Patterns of repetition are shifted in the English translations and various translation strategies are applied, the most common being grammatical transposition and reduction. A statistical assessment of the translation of lexical doublets in three samples is done. The samples are about 2500 words each and randomly selected from the autobiography’s three parts. The figures suggest that one translator (Part One) adopts a source text-oriented strategy versus a shifting strategy preferred by the other two. This is a useful indicator of the direction of the translations, towards either adequacy or acceptability.

The thesis deals with the problems of translating "soft-sell" advertisements between Arabic and English. It is argued that a standardisation strategy of any international advertising campaign across cultures of soft-sell advertising is unsuccessful at any time in the case of Arabic and English. This stems not only from, besides the huge differences already existing between the two languages and cultures, such as socio-economic and socio-political, but also from the different methods and strategies adopted by the copywriters in employing various elements of humour, irony, persuasion, taboos (e.g. sexual connotations), conceptual sarcasm and cultural intertextuality, which are aimed at particular audiences, and the translation of which is determined by the elements of time and space. Localisation, according to the characters of the local market is thus the best solution for any successful cross-cultural advertising. The development of the role of culture and language in a given society has also been illustrated, followed by various approaches to cultural translation equivalence and cultural translation difficulties between Arabic and English. The thesis also contains a study of the techniques and methods of advertising. This includes elements of persuasion, strategies of standardisation, language and paralanguage of advertising, style of advertising and deviation in advertising from the norm of standard English.

Translated esoteric texts that are originally written for a specific 'discourse community' (Swales 1990) in the source language are unlikely to attract readers from outside that community in the target language due to their specialised content and style. The present thesis is based on the hypothesis that adopting a different style in the translation of a non-literary text in the target language will increase its readability and accessibility among a wider readership. It attempts to measure the reader's response to style in a translated text and assess the ability of stylistic shifts to broaden its horizons in the host culture. To test this hypothesis, excerpts from Sent before my Time: a Child Psychotherapist's View of Life on a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit by Margaret Cohen (2003) have been translated into Arabic in two versions that are stylistically different. While the first version recreates the source text style, the second adopts a different approach that borrows stylistic features usually found in fiction and thus opens up the psychotherapeutic discourse implied in the source text. This study uses qualitative and quantitative methods. A total of 150 participants divided into two groups named Professionals and Laypeople took part in a reading experiment in which they were invited to register their response to two versions of the Arabic translation and choose which version they liked best. Surprisingly, the results show that not only the group of Laypeople responded more favourably to the second version but also the group of Professionals who were members of the discourse community addressed by the source text author. The implications of this study are potentially considerable. Stylistic shifts are capable of turning an esoteric text into an exoteric one and thus increasing its chances of being read by a wider readership in the target language.

In the contemporary globalized world, translation plays a key role in sharing news across the globe, in particular in the age of multimedia, where meaning is transferred through various modes and genres. This study focuses on two Arab Spring speeches of Mummar Algaddafi’s and Hosni Mubarak’s and their translations in different media. The thesis initially conducts a comparative study of the source texts (STs), including a textual/contextual analysis drawing on Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, and on Gunther Kress’ multimodal analysis. This is followed by examining the target texts (TTs) to investigate the inventible changes that occur during the translation process, particularly if the translation involves not only a transfer of meaning from Arabic to English but also from mode to mode (such as, speaking to writing) and genre to genre (a political speech to a newspaper article). The thesis introduces the Multimodal Translation Analysis model to investigate the following aspects of the TTs: linguistic aspects of the TTs, the TT’s multimodal qualities, and, drawing on Mona Baker’s narrative theory, the role of dominant narratives in the shaping of the TT.

Arabic satellite television has recently attracted tremendous attention in both the academic and professional worlds, with a special interest in Aljazeera as a curious phenomenon in the Arab region. Having made a household name for itself worldwide with the airing of the Bin Laden tapes, Aljazeera has set out to deliberately change the culture of Arabic journalism, as it has been repeatedly stated by its current General Manager Waddah Khanfar, and to shake up the Arab society by raising awareness to issues never discussed on television before and challenging long-established social and cultural values and norms while promoting, as it claims, Arab issues from a presumably Arab perspective. Working within the meta-frame of democracy, this Qatari-based network station has been received with mixed reactions ranging from complete support to utter rejection in both the west and the Arab world. This research examines the social semiotics of Arabic television and the socio-cultural impact of translation-mediated news in Arabic satellite television, with the aim to carry out a qualitative content analysis, informed by framing theory, critical linguistic analysis, social semiotics and translation theory, within a re-mediation framework which rests on the assumption that a medium “appropriates the techniques, forms and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real" (Bolter and Grusin, 2000: 66). This is a multilayered research into how translation operates at two different yet interwoven levels: translation proper, that is the rendition of discourse from one language into another at the text level, and translation as a broader process of interpretation of social behaviour that is driven by linguistic and cultural forms of another medium resulting in new social signs generated from source meaning reproduced as target meaning that is bound to be different in many respects. The research primarily focuses on the news media, news making and reporting at Arabic satellite television and looks at translation as a reframing process of news stories in terms of content and cultural values. This notion is based on the premise that by its very nature, news reporting is a framing process, which involves a reconstruction of reality into actualities in presenting the news and providing the context for it. In other words, the mediation of perceived reality through a media form, such as television, actually modifies the mind’s ordering and internal representation of the reality that is presented. The research examines the process of reframing through translation news already framed or actualized in another language and argues that in submitting framed news reports to the translation process several alterations take place, driven by the linguistic and cultural constraints and shaped by the context in which the content is presented. These alterations, which involve recontextualizations, may be intentional or unintentional, motivated or unmotivated. Generally, they are the product of lack of awareness of the dynamics and intricacies of turning a message from one language form into another. More specifically, they are the result of a synthesis process that consciously or subconsciously conforms to editorial policy and cultural interpretive frameworks. In either case, the original message is reproduced and the news is reframed. For the case study, this research examines news broadcasts by the now world-renowned Arabic satellite television station Aljazeera, and to a lesser extent the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) and Al- Arabiya where access is feasible, for comparison and crosschecking purposes. As a new phenomenon in the Arab world, Arabic satellite television, especially 24-hour news and current affairs, provides an interesting area worthy of study, not only for its immediate socio-cultural and professional and ethical implications for the Arabic media in particular, but also for news and current affairs production in the western media that rely on foreign language sources and translation mediation for international stories.

Arabic satellite television has recently attracted tremendous attention in both the academic and professional worlds, with a special interest in Aljazeera as a curious phenomenon in the Arab region. Having made a household name for itself worldwide with the airing of the Bin Laden tapes, Aljazeera has set out to deliberately change the culture of Arabic journalism, as it has been repeatedly stated by its current General Manager Waddah Khanfar, and to shake up the Arab society by raising awareness to issues never discussed on television before and challenging long-established social and cultural values and norms while promoting, as it claims, Arab issues from a presumably Arab perspective. Working within the meta-frame of democracy, this Qatari-based network station has been received with mixed reactions ranging from complete support to utter rejection in both the west and the Arab world. This research examines the social semiotics of Arabic television and the socio-cultural impact of translation-mediated news in Arabic satellite television, with the aim to carry out a qualitative content analysis, informed by framing theory, critical linguistic analysis, social semiotics and translation theory, within a re-mediation framework which rests on the assumption that a medium “appropriates the techniques, forms and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real" (Bolter and Grusin, 2000: 66). This is a multilayered research into how translation operates at two different yet interwoven levels: translation proper, that is the rendition of discourse from one language into another at the text level, and translation as a broader process of interpretation of social behaviour that is driven by linguistic and cultural forms of another medium resulting in new social signs generated from source meaning reproduced as target meaning that is bound to be different in many respects. The research primarily focuses on the news media, news making and reporting at Arabic satellite television and looks at translation as a reframing process of news stories in terms of content and cultural values. This notion is based on the premise that by its very nature, news reporting is a framing process, which involves a reconstruction of reality into actualities in presenting the news and providing the context for it. In other words, the mediation of perceived reality through a media form, such as television, actually modifies the mind’s ordering and internal representation of the reality that is presented. The research examines the process of reframing through translation news already framed or actualized in another language and argues that in submitting framed news reports to the translation process several alterations take place, driven by the linguistic and cultural constraints and shaped by the context in which the content is presented. These alterations, which involve recontextualizations, may be intentional or unintentional, motivated or unmotivated. Generally, they are the product of lack of awareness of the dynamics and intricacies of turning a message from one language form into another. More specifically, they are the result of a synthesis process that consciously or subconsciously conforms to editorial policy and cultural interpretive frameworks. In either case, the original message is reproduced and the news is reframed. For the case study, this research examines news broadcasts by the now world-renowned Arabic satellite television station Aljazeera, and to a lesser extent the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) and Al- Arabiya where access is feasible, for comparison and crosschecking purposes. As a new phenomenon in the Arab world, Arabic satellite television, especially 24-hour news and current affairs, provides an interesting area worthy of study, not only for its immediate socio-cultural and professional and ethical implications for the Arabic media in particular, but also for news and current affairs production in the western media that rely on foreign language sources and translation mediation for international stories.

This thesis sets out to investigate the role of cohesion in the organisation and processing of three text types in English and Arabic. In other words, it attempts to shed some light on the descriptive and explanatory power of cohesion in different text typologies. To this effect, three text types, namely, literary fictional narrative, newspaper editorial and science were analysed to ascertain the intra- and inter-sentential trends in textual cohesion characteristic of each text type in each language. In addition, two small scale experiments which aimed at exploring the facilitatory effect of one cohesive device (i.e. lexical repetition) on the comprehension of three English text types by Arab learners were carried out. The first experiment examined this effect in an English science text; the second covered three English text types, i.e. fictional narrative, culturally-oriented and science. Some interesting and significant results have emerged from the textual analysis and the pilot studies. Most importantly, each text type tends to utilize the cohesive trends that are compatible with its readership, reader knowledge, reading style and pedagogical purpose. Whereas fictional narratives largely cohere through pronominal co-reference, editorials and science texts derive much cohesion from lexical repetition. As for cross-language differences English opts for economy in the use of cohesive devices, while Arabic largely coheres through the redundant effect created by the high frequency of most of those devices. Thus, cohesion is proved to be a variable rather than a homogeneous phenomenon which is dictated by text type among other factors. The results of the experiments suggest that lexical repetition does facilitate the comprehension of English texts by Arab learners. Fictional narratives are found to be easier to process and understand than expository texts. Consequently, cohesion can assist in the processing of text as it can in its creation.

Imarat Yaqubyan is a contemporary Arabic novel that encompasses an intensive and variable Arabic culture; this study contains a survey in tables of cultural words, according to Newmark’s categories, “material culture”, “social culture”, “originations”, and  “gestures and habits”, as well as their correspondences in the English and the Swedish translated novel versions. In this tripled language study, Arabic, English and Swedish, I undertake a qualitative comparison between the translation strategies used by each translator of the English and Swedish versions. For this purpose I apply the taxonomy of translation strategies established by Pedersen, which is divided first into SL-oriented strategies categorized into “Retention”, “Specification” and “Direct Translation”, and secondly the TL-oriented that includes “Generalization”, “Substitution” and “Omission”, as well as the “Official Equivalent”. Through my analyses process, I link Newmark’s metaphors types, terminology and the seven procedures of translating metaphors with Pedersen’s strategies.  In this study, Pedersen’s SL and TL-oriented translation strategies are considered to correspond to Venuti’s terminology of domestication and foreignization. Conclusions are drawn about the use of domesticating strategies in certain cultural words categories of both English and Swedish versions. The study devises the term “False Domestication”.
Imarat Yaqubyan är en modern arabisk roman som omfattar en intensiv och dynamisk arabisk kultur. Denna studie innehåller en undersökning, enligt Newmarks kategorier “materiell kultur”, “social kultur”, “uppkomst” och “gester och vanor”, strukturerad i översiktstabeller av kulturella ord förankrade i den arabiska kulturen, samt deras motsvarigheter på engelska och svenska i de översatta romanerna.  I denna trespråkiga studie – arabiska, engelska och svenska – åtar jag mig en kvalitativ jämförelse mellan översättningsstrategierna som används av respektive den svenska och engelska översättaren av romanen. För detta ändamål tillämpar jag Pedersens taxonomi, vilken har delats upp i översättningsstrategier gällande källkultur/text (SL-oriented), nämligen överföring (retention), specificering (specification) och direktöversättning (direct Translation), samt målkultur/text (TL-oriented), vilka inkluderar generalisering (generalization), ersättning (substitution) och utelämning (omission). Därutöver tillämpas strategin officiell motsvarighet (official equivalent). Genom min analys länkar jag samman Newmarks metafortyper, den gällande terminologin och de sju förfaranden Newmark nämner rörande översättningar av metaforer med Pedersens strategier. I denna studie motsvarar Pedersens SL och TL-översättningsstrategier Venutis begrepp domesticering (domestication) och exotisering (foreignization). Slutsatser dras sedermera angående de strategier som avser domesticeringen av vissa specifika kulturella ord i både den engelska och den svenska versionen. I studien lanseras även begreppet falsk domesticering “False Domestication”.

In the age of the internet, email, and social media there is an increasing need for processing online information, for example, to support education and business. This has led to the rapid development of natural language processing technologies such as computational linguistics, information retrieval, and data mining. As a branch of computational linguistics, anaphora resolution has attracted much interest. This is reflected in the large number of papers on the topic published in journals such as Computational Linguistics. Mitkov (2002) and Ji et al. (2005) have argued that the overall quality of anaphora resolution systems remains low, despite practical advances in the area, and that major challenges include dealing with real-world knowledge and accurate parsing. This thesis investigates the following research question: can an algorithm be found for the resolution of the anaphor nafs in Arabic text which is accurate to at least 90%, scales linearly with text size, and requires a minimum of knowledge resources? A resolution algorithm intended to satisfy these criteria is proposed. Testing on a corpus of contemporary Arabic shows that it does indeed satisfy the criteria.

Insertion of source text (henceforth: ST) acronyms and single words/terms (henceforth: item/s) into target text (henceforth: TT) is relatively, so far, a neglected issue in translation studies. In the case of translating a text from English into Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth MSA) in Australia, we are dealing with the issue of inserting an item of a source text (English source text, henceforth EST) into a target text (Arabic target text, henceforth ArTT). The ArTT has newly introduced items in their Roman Letters (henceforth R.I), The ArTT has newly introduced items in their Roman letters (henceforth R.I), transliterated and/or translated with or without being accompanied by their EST counterparts in R.I.

The present study investigates how Discourse Connectives are handled in translation. It starts by reviewing available published studies on DCs with a particular focus on how these impacted on the field of translation studies and translation practice. DCs in English are mainly looked at from two different angles as the study shows: coherence/cohesion theory or from a relevance theory perspective. In Arabic, they are mainly grammatical structures. The study provides arguments which explain why looking at these linguistic structures from a relevance theory standpoint provide a better basis for understanding their role and the discourse in which they occur. The aim of the present research is to investigate how Discourse Connectives (DCs)- the structures used to provide the reader/hearer with clues as to what direction the writer/speaker wants them to focus on- are handled in translation. The research attempts to shed light on choices translators make when encountering DCs, and endeavours to put these choices to scrutiny by drawing on relevance theory. Thus, the main hypothesis adopted is that each instance a DCs is utilised, it is assumed that it bears a degree of relevance to the reader/hearer or in other words assist them to a less costly process - in terms of time and mental processing effort - in reaching the intended communication. To provide evidence for this view an empirical investigation was carried out. The corpus studied was published by the American geo- political studies think-tank (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) were selected together with their professionally translated and published versions. An investigation of DCs and their translation was carried out on carefully selected corpora. The basis of this discussion is the application of the Principle of Relevance as suggested by proponents of Relevance Theory in reaching the intended meaning in the source text through contextual effects (knowledge of the world, to use relevance theory proponents terms) and the notion of 'clues7, provided by discourse connectives, which facilitate a successful rendering.