This is an applied study that critically analyzes the Arabic-English translation of a key cultural text: the biography of the Prophet Muhammad entitled The Sealed Nectar. It aims at assessing the translation to see how successful the translator was in composing an equivalent text to such a culture-specific one. The study adopts Juliane House's (1997) translation quality assessment model which is based on Systemic Functional Linguistic theory and relates texts to their situational and cultural contexts. In order to introduce a qualitative judgement of the work, the study enhances House’s model to make it applicable to culture-bound texts that call for overt translation. It introduces a consilience of: 1) Nord’s notion of culturemes; 2) Nida’s categorization of cultural features to help in analyzing religious terms and culture; 3) Dickins et al.’s compensation strategies that show the translator’s endeavor to balance the translation loss while dealing with such sensitive terms; 4) Martin and White’s appraisal theory which explores attitudinal meaning and, hence, helps in investigating the translator’s evaluation of these terms; and 5) Katan’s model that helps in highlighting the correlation between levels of cultures and discourse variables (field, mode and tenor). Application of the enhanced model reveals mismatches on all the discourse variables which indicate the application of a cultural filter that adopts the norms of English academic discourse, in addition to overt errors that distort the message of this sensitive text. The study thus complements House’s framework of translation quality assessment and introduces a model that can be further applied to assess overt translations.

This study is intended as an exercise in applied linguistics. Its purpose is to explore work done on the description of language use for insights which might be developed and exploited for the preparation of language teaching materials, in particular for those learners of English who need the language for the furtherance of their specialist studies. Chapter 1 establishes this applied linguistic perspective. Chapter 2 examines what is involved in delimiting the scope of grammatical statement and looks at the ontological and heuristic validity of the langue/parole dichotomy. This prepares the ground for a consideration, in the two chapters which follow, of attempts to extend the scope of linguistic description by redrawing the lines of idealization to include variation and context. Chapter 3 surveys attempts to characterize language varieties in terms of their formal properties and introduces a distinction between usage, defined as the exemplification of linguistic forms, and use, defined as the communicative function these forms are used to fulfil. This distinction is developed further in Chapter 4 in which text analysis is distinguished from discourse analysis, the former having to do with cohesion, or sentence linkage, and the latter with coherence, or the manner in which utterances are related to each other as communicative acts. This leads in to the discussion of the relationship between sentences and utterances in Chapter 5, which deals with the problems involved in attempting to account for language use in grammatical terms, and which establishes discourse as a pragmatic rather than a semantic matter. Chapters 6-8 represent a development of the approach to discourse which emerges from the preceding chapters. Chapter 6 introduces the key notion of rhetorical value, which is defined as the meaning which attaches to linguistic forms when they occur mutually conditioned in contexts of actual use. Value is contrasted with signification, which is the meaning that linguistic forms have as elements of the language code. The two notions are discussed in relation to the sentence/utterance distinction and it is proposed that both of these should be distinguished from the locution, which is defined as the representation of a potential utterance, as distinct from a sentence which is defined as an exemplification of grammatical rules. Whereas Chapter 6 illustrates how value is realized with reference to lexical items, Chapter 7 shows how it is realized through locutions to create different illocutionary acts in a discourse, and the illocutionary act of explanation is discussed in some detail. The second half of this chapter is devoted to a specimen analysis which is intended as an illustration of the approach to discourse analysis that is being proposed. In Chapter 6 the notion of value is applied to linguistic elements corresponding to the terminal symbols of a generative grammar and in Chapter 7 it is applied to those corresponding to the initial symbol. Chapter 8 now relates the notion to linguistic elements which correspond to the non-terminal symbols representing sentence constituents which are subject to transformational operations. Transformational rules are shown as essentially rhetorical devices for creating ambiguity by dissociating locutions from specific deep structure sources and by thus providing them with a freedom to take on whichever value is appropriate in the context. Chapter 9 is a restatement of the principles of dis¬ course analysis which this study has aimed at establishing and suggests how the approach that has been outlined corresponds to other approaches to discourse analysis in¬ formed by linguistic, sociological and sociolinguistic orientations to the description of language use. The final chapter is concerned with pedagogic application. It shows how the signification/value distinction relates to situational and notional approaches to language teaching. It further shows how the insights discovered and developed in this study might be exploited by providing examples of exercises which are based on the same rhetorical principles as those which, it has been argued, must be applied in a satisfactory analysis of discourse.

The experiments reported in this thesis examine the time-course of talker-specificity and lexical competition effects during word learning. It is typically assumed that talker-specificity effects depend on access to highly-detailed lexical representations whilst lexical competition effects depend more on abstract, overlapping representations that allow phonologically-similar words to compete during spoken word recognition. By tracking the time-course of these two effects concurrently it was possible to examine the contributions of episodic and abstract representations to recognition and processing of newly-learned words. Results indicated that talker-specific information affected recognition of both novel and existing words immediately after study, and continued to influence recognition of newly-learned words one week later. However, in the delayed test sessions talker information appeared to be less influential during recognition of recently studied existing words and novel words studied in more than one voice. In comparison, lexical competition effects for novel words were absent immediately after study but emerged one day later and remained relatively stable across the course of a week. Together the evidence is most consistent with a hybrid model of lexical representation in which episodic representations are generated rapidly, but robust abstract representations emerge only after a period of sleep-associated offline consolidation. Possible factors contributing to a change in reliance between episodic and abstract representational subsystems include the novelty of an item and the amount of variability in the input during learning. However, talker-specific lexical competition effects were observed in the one week retest, suggesting either that episodic and abstract representations were co-activated during spoken word recognition at this time point, or that perhaps talker information associated with newly-learned words was consolidated in long-term memory alongside phonological information.

The aim of this thesis is to provide a unified account of the comprehension of novel and conventional figurative uses of language in everyday conversation. The first two chapters present a view of human cognition as having evolved towards increasing efficiency, characterised by the selection and processing of just those sources of information which are likely to yield cognitive benefits and incur limited costs in processing effort. Pursuing the pragmatic framework of Relevance Theory developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, I take this view of cognition to set the grounds for a relevance-driven, inferential approach to human communication. The rest of the thesis focuses on the role that selective accessing and inference play in the comprehension of a range of everyday figurative uses varying in their degree of familiarity or conventionality. After reviewing existing cognitive approaches to metaphor in chapter three, I provide my own relevance-theoretic analysis in the next chapter. I argue that metaphor interpretation involves processing assumptions selected from the encyclopaedic entry of the concept encoded by the metaphor vehicle and the inferential construction of a new (broader) concept. In chapter five, I analyse the claim that the meaning of idioms is not completely arbitrary but partly related to the meaning of their parts. In chapter six, I provide an account of the interpretation of idioms (and idiom variants) which captures this relation. In these chapters, it is argued that the selective processing resulting from relevance-driven comprehension often leads to the construction of new concepts for novel metaphorical uses and the development of pragmatic routines for processing familiar figurative uses.

Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) is currently the most promising and widely studied paradigm in the broader field of Machine Translation, continuously explored in order to improve its performance and to find solutions to its current shortcomings, in particular the sparsity of big bilingual corpora in a variety of domains or genres to be used as training data. However, while one the main trends is still to rely as much as possible on already available large collections of data, even when they do not fit quite well specific translation tasks in terms of relatedness of content, the possibility of using less but appropriately selected training sets - depending on the textual variety of the documents that need to be translated case by case - has not been extensively explored as much so far. The goal of this research is to investigate whether this latter possibility, i.e. the lack of availability of large quantities of assorted data, can have a possible solution in the application of strategies commonly used in genre and domain classification (including unsupervised topic modeling and document dissimilarity techniques), in particular performing subsampling experiments on bilingual corpora in order to obtain a good fit between training data and the texts that need to be translated with SMT. For the purposes of this study, already existing freely available large corpora were found to be unsuitable for the selection of domain/document specifc subsamples, so two new parallel corpora - English-Italian and English-German - were compiled employing the \web as corpus" approach on websites containing translated content. Then some tests were made on documents belonging to different varieties, translated with SMT systems built using subsamples of training data selected using document dissimilarity measures in order to pick up the most suitable documents as training data. Such method has shown how the choice of subsampling strategy heavily depends on the text variety of each considered document, but it has also proven that better translation results can be obtained from small samples of training sets rather than using all the available data, which brings benefits also in terms of quicker training times and use of fewer computational resources.

This thesis provides an analysis of four stylistic features of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (ST) and their equivalents in two Arabic translations (TT1 and TT2): 1. The coordinator and; 2. Existential there; 3. Dummy it; and 4. Fronted adverbials. Examples of these four stylistic features are identified in the ST, TT1, and TT2. Their formal (structural/syntactic) and functional (semantic) properties are then anlaysed linguistically from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Two reader-response questionnaires are administered, one dealing with the ST and the other with TT2. These are used to ascertain readers’ reactions to extracts involving these four stylistic features in the ST and their correspondents in TT2. Finally, the results of the formal and functional analyses of the four stylistic features are compared with those of the reader-response questionnaires. The linguistic analysis reveals that all four stylistic features considered give rise to a variety of translation procedures in TT1 and TT2. It also reveals some changes from the ST meaning in the TTs, particularly in the case of fronted adverbials. The questionnaire analysis shows that while ST respondents saw the ST as ‘simple’ and ‘vivid’ regarding these features positively, TT2 respondents frequently regarded TT2 as ‘simple’ but saw this as a negative feature. Their general view was that Arabic TT2 has a poor style, because it fails to exhibit traditional stylistic and rhetorical features of Arabic writing, such as metaphor and parallelism. Apparently identical stylistic effects, such as ‘simplicity’, may not hold the same value for TT respondents, as for ST respondents. The thesis finally shows the relevance and applicability to the data examined and analyses carried out of a number of translation norms proposed by key translation studies scholars who have dealt with norms: Nord, Toury and Chesterman: 1. Nord’s regulative norms (conventions) (considered identical to Toury’s textual-linguistic norms); 2. Toury’s initial norms; 3. Chesterman’s communication norm; and 4. Chesterman’s relation norm.

The translation of Arabic literature into English is a wide field of study. The present study focuses only on one aspect - the translation of metaphor in selected poems of Mahmoud Darwish. Arabic is widely known as a strongly metaphorical language, and Darwish’s poems as part of Arabic literature hold many embedded meanings and metaphors that play a major role in building up their artistic flavour. In many translations of Arabic poems, metaphors and other figures of speech are mistranslated and, consequently, misunderstood by target text (TT) readers. This affects the meaning, form, imagery and moral/theme and leads to a distorted and inferior copy of the original poem. The present study aims to analyse the Arabic-to-English translation approaches adopted in rendering metaphors in poetic discourse, with specific reference to ten of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems. Six of the poems chosen have been translated more than once. This approach to selection will provide a platform for a comparative/contrastive analysis between different translations. The other four poems are translated only once. In fact, Darwish is a poet of universal significance whose message transcends the personal to the public, and he is well known for using many types of metaphors in his poems to relay certain messages and images to express his themes in an indirect way. The researcher will analyse each metaphor in the source text (ST) and its translation(s) to investigate whether or not the translators have succeeded in conveying the metaphor and message accurately, the type of resemblance embedded in the original poems, as well as the effect of the new metaphor on the reader of English. The study makes use of the fields of text linguistics, lexical semantics, and contrastive linguistics.

This thesis reports on an empirical study which attempts to answer basic questions about translation competence as a key issue in translation studies, through the conceptual replication of Campbell’s (1998) model to test the applicability of the model on translating into L1. It is a process-oriented study which presents a methodology for the testing of the model through the quantitative statistical analysis of the translator’s output. The primary aim is pedagogical and it is carried out in the framework of applied linguistics, translation studies in general and translator training in particular. The study is focused on the investigation of the three components of Campbell’s model: textual competence, disposition and monitoring. Theoretically, the model assumes that the interrelation among these components constitutes the function of the translator’s competence. The study investigates questions regarding the ways in which translators into L1 vary in regard of the three components. The central question, which represents the ultimate aim, is about the extent to which these aspects are helpful in characterizing the competence of student-translators as revealed by their individual profiles. The profiles are based on the results of an experiment in which translations of two texts were undertaken by a group of twenty-five participants (L1 Arabic MA translation students translating from English into Arabic). The findings of the study show that translators into the first language markedly vary in their output in respect to the three components of the model, which confirms its applicability. The current study claims that it has successfully sharpened Campbell’s measure by transforming the behavioural statements of characterizing translation competence into numerical values for each component to make the individual’s competence more easily interpretable. Certainly, numerical values have easily recognizable discrimination ability which makes them suitable to rank translators in a dependable and justifiable way.

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