On the assumption that the translation strategies used to translate American fast-food advertisements into Arabic cause the Arabic translations to be culturally bound to their originals, the aim of the present study is to identify such translation strategies. The study was conducted with the aid of questionnaires as a primary research method to obtain data which are then complemented by means of textual analyses of the corpus. The findings reveal that the main translation strategies used to translate phrases in fast-food advertisements from English into Arabic are borrowing and transliteration. The overall finding is that inadequate translations of culture-specific concepts, phrases, logos and terms produce target texts which are bound to the source texts. This causes the translations to be rejected by the target culture. / Linguistics / M.A. (Linguistics)

On the assumption that the translation strategies used to translate American fast-food advertisements into Arabic cause the Arabic translations to be culturally bound to their originals, the aim of the present study is to identify such translation strategies. The study was conducted with the aid of questionnaires as a primary research method to obtain data which are then complemented by means of textual analyses of the corpus. The findings reveal that the main translation strategies used to translate phrases in fast-food advertisements from English into Arabic are borrowing and transliteration. The overall finding is that inadequate translations of culture-specific concepts, phrases, logos and terms produce target texts which are bound to the source texts. This causes the translations to be rejected by the target culture. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (Linguistics)

Den här magisteruppsatsen består av en partiell översättning från japanska till svenska av IMAMURA Natsukos bok Kvinnan i den lila kjolen samt en översättningskommentar med fokus på kulturspecifika kategorier uttryckt i det japanska språket som egocentriciteten och andra kulturspecifika element i den japanska texten, de beskrivande onomatope (onomatopoetiska och mimetiska uttryck), och de västerländska låneordens förskjutningar (shifts) i en översättning. Dessa kategorier kan upplevas som svåra att översätta mellan två språk som ligger långt ifrån varandra. De teoretiska ramarna för uppsatsen lägger tyngdpunkten på riktningsekvivalens (directional equivalence), ett begrepp myntat av Anthony Pym, med fokus på likhet (similarities) i översättningen (Chesterman 1996), tillsammans med den etiska utgångspunkten representationell rättvisa (representational justice), beskrivet av Liu Yameng (2007). De utgör basen för översättningsmetoden och blir ledljus i översättningsval för översättning mellan språk i periferin av varandra. / This essay consists of a partial translation of IMAMURA Natsuko’s book The Woman In The Purple Skirt from Japanese to Swedish, together with a translation commentary focusing on egocentricity and other culture-specific concepts in Japanese texts, the descriptive onomatope (onomatopoetic and mimetic expressions) and the shifts in loanwords from western languages when translated. These categories are prone to cause issues when translating between languages so far removed from each other. The theoretical framework in this essay concentrates on directional equivalence, an expression coined by Anthony Pym, focusing on similarities in translations (Chesterman 1996) together with the ethical starting point representational justice as described by Liu Yameng (2007). These form the base for the translation method and serve as guiding lights in the choices made when translating between languages peripheral to each other.