A PhD Dissertation in

Linguistics and
Translation

A Cognitive Approach to Translation

Shifts: Using an LDC Arabic-English
Parallel Corpus
Radwa Mohammad Mohammad Kotait
Assistant Lecturer – English Department
Faculty of Al-Alsun – Ain Shams University
2010
Introduction:
•Translation is a decision-making
process.
•It is not only a communicative and
textual operation, but also the result of
cognitive processing (presupposing
choices, alternatives, decisions,
strategies, aims & goals.
•Translation shifts have always been
the center of translation studies.
•They can be due to the translator’s
choice or they can be imposed due to
linguistic or cultural lacunae.
Cognitive Descriptive Corpus
Translation Linguistics
Semantics Studies
 Cognitive Semantics
Cognitive Semantics refuses
Meaningto is
reduce language to mere
Meaning is Conceptualization.
Meaning is moreencyclopedic
algorithms or to a direct
as versus
The choice of words or
than an objectivethe dictionary
correspondence of between
viewsyntactic structures reflects a
level of conceptual linguistic
meaning, elements and the
as CS refuses
conceptualization or
representation. the dichotomy
entities in the world.
CONSTRUAL of the experience
between semantics &
communicated by the speaker
pragmatics
Construal Operations Construal Operations
The ability to is the ability to “conceive and portray the same
situation in alternate ways”. It is .
 Croft & Cruse’s (2004) Taxonomy of
Construal Operations CONSTRUAL OPERATIONS
Collaboration
• Construal operations have been
widely used to analyze the various
means of categorizing a particular
situation within a single language.
• The challenge has been to use them
as a tool of inferring what actually
takes place during the translation
process itself between two
languages as a result of the cognitive
processing carried out by the
translator.
 Descriptive Translation
Studies
DTS has come to put an
Regarding translation as an end to this unproductive
equative relation has line of enquiry,
Concepts like “fidelity”, highlighting the need to
“faithfulness”, even resulted in theories that
have attempted to observe how translators
“equivalence” have overcome difficulties in
contributed over the determine certain modes of
ideal translation, where real life translational
years to viewing any contexts without any
shift in translation as shifts are “errors”,
“mistranslations”, or at best evaluative aims
an act of TREASON!
“unwelcome deviations”.
 Holmes’ Categorization of DTS
Process-Oriented DTS

Translation process research calls for the identification,

description and analysis of what happens during
translation , and of the mental steps taken by the
translator as the reader of the ST and the author of the TT.
 Corpus Linguistics
makes use of different types of
; monolingual or
multilingual; general or specific;
is “an parallel or comparable.
A is “a approach
collection of that studies
has first been introduced by
texts that have been people(1993).
examples of what have It has coincided
gathered in form , rather
with than
the turn of translation studies
about
according to aCorpus Linguistics
setaway
of from+ what they Studiestowards
Translation = Corpus Translation Studies
” or say” .
 Parallel Corpus
Parallel Corpus in CTS
arrange STs and TTs in
a way that allows
The oldest parallel corpus researchers to locate
is the they can shed
in all
theoccurrences
last of any
light
in on has
discovered in Rasheeddecade translation
expression in the ST
emerged
1799. Seeing the as astrategies
The problem used with parallel
distinct field along
of CL with the
hieroglyphs, demoticdependingcorpora, onesp.
the Arabic-
research. corresponding
script and Greek inparallel realizations
Englishsentences
ones,of is in the TT.
parallel has led tothe search word(s) , i.e.inshowing
deciphering hieroglyphs. the which
SL andpartitsof the ST is
correspondences
translated with in which
partthe
of the
TL. TT on the level
of words, phrases,
sentences and
paragraphs.
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