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Research Paper | Language Research | Palestinian Territories | Volume 9 Issue 1, January 2020

The Translatability of Arabic Objects into English in Yahya Hakkis Novel The Lamp of Umm Hashim

Tasneem Aqel

Abstract: This study aims to identify the problems of translating Objects from Arabic into English in Hakki's^2 novel The Lamp of Umm Hashim: ????? ?? ???? (1944). ^3 It pinpoints their causes, examines the strategies adopted, and suggests some recommendations to cope with such problematic areas. Moreover, it examines the translation of fifty objects in thirty examples excerpted from the novel in which the same example would include more than one type of objects or different patterns of the same object or maybe both. Thirty students of translation (15 BA and 15 MA) at Yarmouk University serve as the sample (participants) of the study. They were asked to translate the underlined objects in light of the their original contexts. The researcher evaluates students' renderings against Davies' ^4 (2004)^5suggested translation of the novel in terms of adequacy. Then she compares BA translations with MA ones for a possible harmony or inconsistencies. The study shows that students mainly give adequate translations to the objects investigated and that their errors are almost semantic more than syntactic. They show adequacy in translating the object of accompaniment in particular, and provide semi-adequate translations mostly to the adverbs of time and place. However, the cognate object is the most to pose difficulty for students as the cognate object in English is not used frequently as in Arabic; thus, it represents the highest percentage of non-translated objects. Students make different errors while translating such as ignoring the context, providing ungrammatical structures, giving wrong choice of terms, and missing the intended meaning. Students resort to adopt faithful translation, literal translation, and word-for-word translation as strategies when they encounter a problem. Accordingly, students should take the context into consideration, use communicative or semantic translation to provide appropriate lexical terms, avoid word-for-word translation, and pay attention to meaning and structure.

Keywords: Translation, Objects, Arabic, English, The Direct and Indirect Object, The Cognate Object, The Complement of Cause, Adverbs of Time and Place, The Object of Accompaniment

Edition: Volume 9 Issue 1, January 2020,

Pages: 1286 - 1312

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