This thesis aims to introduce the theoretical concept of stance, as an aspect of interpersonal meaning, into the discipline of Translation Studies and to explore the reproduction of stance in translations of a heavily opinionated political genre commissioned by newspapers. It seeks to provide an account of how patterns of stance are conveyed in newspaper opinion articles on the ‘Arab Spring’ originally published in English in the Washington Post and the New York Times and then how these patterns are re-conveyed in full translations of these articles for two quality Arabic-language newspapers with divergent editorial policies: Al-Ghad and Al-Ittihad. A triangulation of methods is employed for providing a coherent analysis of stance at different levels: lexico-grammatical, textual, and contextual. Accordingly, the methodology chosen for the purposes of the study is a combination of corpus- and discourse-analytical methods that operate within the tradition of descriptive translation studies. The former is drawn from the lexicogrammatical framework of stance (Biber et al., 1999; Biber, 2006), while the latter is drawn from appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005). Also, the combined methodology is complemented by some aspects of Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis (1992, 1995a) and Baker’s narrative theory (2006), which, to varying degrees, allow for the contextualisation of the findings and the explanation of translational behaviour. The main contribution of the thesis is that it introduces a new theoretical concept into the field – the concept of stance. This has not previously been approached within translation studies, although it has been high on the research agenda for the past two decades or so within the field of linguistics and its neighbouring disciplines. Also, the thesis has designed and tested a new combined theoretical approach to analyse this phenomenon within the tradition of descriptive translation studies. Moreover, this thesis contributes to the field as well by addressing a new form of shifts in translation, namely shift in stance. The examination of the conveyance and reconveyance of stance reveals that significant shifts in stance occurred in the Arabic translations produced by Al-Ghad and Al-Ittihad. These shifts result in the weakening, accentuation, and entire loss of original stance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:632566 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Al-Shunnag, M. A. |
| Publisher | University of Salford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://usir.salford.ac.uk/32823/ |
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