The majority of the available studies which have been done on word order in Arabic are derived from improvised and restricted data taken from the classical variety of Arabic. ALL these studies are generatively-oriented, and consequently their main concern was to find out which word order is the basic one and which orders derive from it. In brief, all these studies are basically structural and have very little, if anything, to do with the situations in which the language was used or with the factors that motivated it's use. We think that such treatments are inadequate, because: (1) the modern standard variety has been totally neglected, and (2) the basic functions of Language as a tool of human communication is not accounted for by these studies. To make up for these inadequacies we are going to approach the issue of word order from a functional vantage point which seeks to relate the structure and it's function. Secondly, we will choose 'Modern Standard Arabic' to be our field of inquiry. Thirdly, all the examples which we are going to discuss will be taken from concrete linguistic situations. We intend to test the following hypotheses: 1. The traditional dichotomy of word order in marked/unmarked terms at the sentence level is unsatisfactory. 2. It is useful to differentiate between basicness and unmarkedness of word order. 3. The frequency with which each word order type occurs may depend on the type of text, and the attitude of the writer towards his/her addressees. 4. A switch from a certain word order-type to another within the same text can sometimes be determined by a shift in the text-typologicalfocus. 5. Permutations of sentence constituents in Arabic sometimes change the grammatical status of the constituents permuted and sometimes do not. 6. The Principle of Functional Sentence Perspective has great influence in Arabic Language, 7. Passivization as a syntactic device influences the order of words in Arabic. 8. Reasons for having different word orders in Arabic can be elucidated by appealing to other cornrnunicative considerations. 9. Different word orders in Arabic serve semantic, syntactic and pragmatic functions.

This thesis addresses the issue of the publication of translations, specifically the under-representation of literary works in one language of limited diffusion (LLD), the Malay language, in English translation. It sets out to examine the role of two parties which are thought to play a vital role in the publication of Malay literary works in English translation for international consumption: publishers in the United Kingdom and the translation organisation in Malaysia. The aim of the research, more specifically, is to investigate how both parties bear upon the translation of Malay literary works into English. Some of the questions which are central to the issue of the publication of Malay literary works in English translation include: To what extent are the two parties involved in the publication of Malay literary works in English translation for international consumption? What are the policies of these organisations where the translation of Malay literary works and other literary works in LLD are concerned? Who decides what to translate? What factors are taken into account in deciding what to publish in English translation? Given that this thesis sets out to examine the role of the two parties mentioned above, two main strategies have been employed: surveys and case studies. Drawing on responses from individuals from publishing companies, translation organisations, and other organisations which support translation, I have been able to show that the problem in the publication of Malay literary works in English translation is not merely a translation problem but also a problem of image and promotion. This study thus details the different forces working against the translation of Malay literary works into English for international consumption.

Unlike most Asian nations to which Shakespeare was imported with the colonizers during the mid-1800s to impose Western literary culture on the colonized, in the case of Thailand, it is the other way round. Thailand (or Siam as it was called then) managed to escape colonization by Western powers, but during this politically unstable period, Siam felt the urgent need to westernize the country. A period of intensive westernization thus began. Shakespeare arrived as one of several significant elements of the nation’s self-westernization in literary education. In 1916, the name of Shakespeare became widely known in Siam as one of his plays, The Merchant of Venice, was translated by King Vajiravudh (1881-1925), who is highly regarded as a prolific dramatist and all-around man of letters in the country. The King himself initiated Western literary translation by translating three plays by Shakespeare, namely The Merchant of Venice (1916), As You Like It (1921), and Romeo and Juliet (1922), and also by adapting Shakespeare’s Othello (1925) into a Siamese conventional dance drama playtext. Although there were some other attempts before and after the King to translate Shakespeare, none of them has been successful in leaving a memorable impact in Thai literary circles as much as the King’s version. Translating and staging Shakespeare’s works in Thailand became rare, practised only within a small circle of literary scholars. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, there have been a handful of attempts to translate and stage Shakespearean plays by commercial Thai theatre practitioners. To stage Shakespeare’s plays in Thailand especially in a contemporary context, most production teams have encountered a similar difficulty, that of bridging the gap to bring Shakespeare to Thai popular audiences who embrace different backgrounds in dramatic practice and aesthetics. The main purposes of this study are, therefore, to examine how Shakespeare has been translated, staged, and received by Thai readers and audiences from the late nineteenth century when Shakespeare was introduced in Siam until today, and to locate his influences and impact on Thai literary and theatrical culture. This study is designed to shed light on the history of Thai translations of Shakespeare and also to provide an analysis of the translation strategies adopted by early Thai translators to domesticate Shakespeare into the Thai context. So the thesis examines the process of text appropriation and domestication adopted by Thai translators and theatre practitioners to make Shakespeare accessible to Thai readers and popular audiences. The use of Shakespeare’s plots and allusions to Shakespeare’s plays in contemporary Thai television soap operas is also another main focus of the study. This study also suggests that the domestication process applied to Shakespeare both in translation and in staging is influenced by the changes in the social, political and aesthetic contexts of each different period; furthermore, the process of domestication obviously becomes less problematic the further the country moves towards westernization.

During the interactions between the Chinese and the English from the 1750s to the 1840s, writers from both countries have created many distinctive images to represent "the Other" in their own discourses. Imagologists like Jean-Marc Moura (1992) and Daniel-Henri Pageaux (1994) indicated that every image of an "Other" de facto corresponds to an image of "Self." Consequently, the reciprocal images of the British and the Chinese may not only reflect individual writer's attitude towards "the Other" but also refract the self-images of each writer's own people and society. As writers are more or less conditioned by their immediate society, their images of "the Other" tend to reflect the collective ideology of a society. A study of reciprocal images in their own historical milieus will enable one to see why both parties were conditioned to produce certain images to represent "the Other" and why certain images may last longer than the others or even become stereotypes in different discourses. This thesis argues that neither the British nor the Chinese had unanimous images for each other from the 1750s to the 1840s, a century prior to the first Opium War. Instead, writers of both countries had created various negative and positive images of "the Other" to meet their own intentions during this period. By discussing the political, psychological and sociological meanings of the reciprocal images of the British and the Chinese diachronically and synchronically, this thesis suggests that writers might follow certain principles and rules to formulate their own images of other people as "the Other."

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.

It is widely recognised that language learners require extensive vocabulary knowledge to cope with the demands of studying content fields in English. As well as being rich in general academic and technical terms, academic discourse has been shown to make frequent use of metaphor to express abstract concepts and to achieve rhetorical goals. While research has shown the benefits of raising learners' awareness of the underlying motivation of metaphorical expressions, these findings have yet to be applied to authentic classrooms over longer periods of study. This thesis examines the effects of raising Japanese learners' awareness of metaphorical expressions in a CLIL anthropology course. It examines the written work from two groups of learners: a control group whose language instruction focussed on academic and high frequency vocabulary and an experimental group who received instruction on course-specific metaphorical themes. Variation in metaphor production is compared for the two conditions and across learner abilities, and the interaction between the frequency, dispersion and salience of metaphors in classroom input and learner output is considered. The study then investigates the influences of word frequency, part of speech, phraseology and the L1 on learner metaphor production before concluding with recommendations for pedagogic practice and further study.

This thesis considers how language development takes place over time by a group of 124 secondary school students of English. A series of five studies were conducted for this purpose using the tools and methods from corpus linguistics and written discourse analysis. Specifically, the thesis presents a detailed analysis of (1) how a set of function words (that, to and of) were used by these students over a 24-month period, and (2) how narrating practices concerning the structure of selected individual texts changed over time. The two distinct strands of investigation, both of which based on an inductive methodology, highlight, on the one hand, the extent to which there are common as well as unique aspects of language use observed across time and space (Francis et al., 1996, 1998) and, on the other, the role of human agency and meaning making practices in using linguistic resources over time and in shaping and constructing texts within and across individuals. Taken together, the overall inductive methodology and an emphasis on treating all instances of the conventionally labelled ‘learner language’ as equally valid features of natural human language use, show clear advantages over alternative approaches based on a deficit model.

Using wide-ranging literature and theoretical concepts published digitally and in print, this thesis will build the emerging picture of African literature in English that is being published in the digital space. The study will analyse the technological production of classed and sexualised bodies in new African writing in cyberspace by some of the young writers from Nigeria and Kenya, as well as writing from a few of their contemporaries from other African countries. This thesis will also analyse the differences between the agenda of the previous generation – including representation and perspectives - and that of a new generation in cyberspace. In the process, I hope to show how literature in cyberspace is asking questions as much of psychic landscapes as of the material world. To my knowledge, there is no substantive literary study done so far that contextualizes this digital experience.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials has caused controversy as well as enjoyed great popularity among readers worldwide. Its influence has created a great impact in the field of children’s literature. The purpose of this thesis is two-fold. Firstly, the thesis analyzes gender representations in Pullman’s trilogy in the context of how he rewrites female archetypes through the subversive re-inscription of Eve, the invention of daemons, the reinvention of ‘femme fatale’, and the new portrayal of Gypsy women. Secondly, the thesis aims at comparing and examining how gender representations in the source text are translated, transformed or / and manipulated in its Chinese translation. With reference to Chinese gender ideology, which includes the Chinese concept of the ying-yang polarities, Buddhist notions of gender, the notion of the femme fatale, and the stereotypical image of Chinese grannies, the syntactic and semantic alterations made by the Chinese translator are investigated. Issues regarding how Chinese gender views may influence and alter the translation product are discussed in detail. By studying the similarities and differences in gender representations between the texts, the thesis attempts to shed light on the gender ideology of both English and Chinese contemporary cultures.

No description available.