Translating Measure Terms From Arabic Into English: A Sociolinguistic Approach

الملخص

Based on a sociolinguistic approach, the authors investigate the translation of measure terms from Jordanian Spoken Arabic (JSA) into English. It shows that the Jordanian culture and social background control the use of certain terms related to parts of the human body to describe sizes, lengths, and amounts. When translated, these unique socio-cultural terms pose serious challenges to translators due to the difficulty of finding the Target Language (henceforth TL) equivalence and/ or of providing the exact metric measures. The theoretical framework of this study draws on a sociolinguistics approach to translation, as it is pivotal to the understanding of the social meaning of an utterance when rendering it from Source Text (henceforth ST) into Target Text (henceforth TT). The data of the study consisted of 19 measure terms in their context of occurrence in everyday conversation in JSA to be translated from Arabic into English by M.A students in the translation program at Yarmouk University. This study reveals that the predominant translating strategies employed by translators include: using different but more accurate units of measurement, communicating the measure terms functionally, and using measure terms denoting an indefinite amount of something (some) as equivalent to a roughly defined amount in the Source Language (henceforth SL) measure term. The present study is an attempt to analyze these commonly- used measure terms within the social context of JSA. Finally, this study sheds light on the problems encountered when rendering these terms into English, with the aim of disambiguating them for the target audience.