An order of preference can thus be identified and may be taken as indicative
of certain general trends in English and Arabic. This is set out in
Figure 8.2
.
Such rank scales are not merely statistical norms but are actually important
indicators of psycho-cognitive predilections that underpin language use in
activities as varied as translation and conversation. To illustrate this, let us
consider
Sample 8.4
as a text to be translated. The following analysis will primarily
show how the textual resources of Arabic are stretched when handling counter-
argumentation and how translation is likely to suffer as a result.
Sample 8.4
Mismanaged Algeria
The country’s troubles are so glaring that it is easy to forget Algeria’s
strengths. At three o’clock in the afternoon in the poor over-crowded Casbah of
Algiers, children leave school not to beg but to do their homework. Investment
of some two-fifths of GDP a year during much of the 1960s and 1970s gave
Algeria the strongest industrial base in Africa north of the Limpopo. The
northern coastal bit of the country, where 96% of its 23m people live, is rich and
fertile. It used to feed the Romans. It could feed Algerians if it were better
farmed.
These strengths are being wasted.
Some 180,000 well-schooled Algerians
enter the job market every year. Yet a hobbled economy adds only 100,000 new
jobs a year, and some 45% of these involve working for the government. Algeria
lacks the foreign currency it needs to import raw materials and spare parts to
keep its factories running. The collective farms have routinely fallen short of
their targets, leaving Algeria ever more reliant on imported food.
For reasons already mentioned, we suggest that the overall balance (the entire
text) is generally very difficult to handle in translation into Arabic. This is borne
out by our own experience of working on this text with generations of advanced
translator trainees. Some of the changes required by the textual systems of both
English and Arabic and the difficulties involved in dealing with
Sample 8.4
may
be listed as follows:
1 The translator needs to make sure that the thesis cited to be opposed (the
entire first paragraph) is rendered in a way that reflects the attitude of the
source text producer towards what could be implied by the facts listed (i.e.
less than whole-hearted commitment). This list of strengths is used here
merely as the background against which weaknesses are shortly to be
exposed. The procedure involved, which is alien to the way speakers of
Arabic would normally argue, is thus a major obstacle to comprehending the
source text and reproducing it in the target language.
2 The translator needs to to turn an implicit counter-argument into an explicit
one, by retrieving the suppressed connector
(but, however), and using this to
initiate the counter-stance at the beginning of paragraph two:
These
112 THE
TRANSLATOR AS COMMUNICATOR
strengths are being wasted. Ideally, this should be done without
compromising source text subtlety, a process which makes the retrieval of
pragmatic connectivity particularly onerous.
3 This is further compounded by another problem, namely, incongruity. The
expectation which
These strengths are being wasted invites will be that
what follows must be a list of negative ‘wastes’. However, what
immediately follows
(Some 180,000 well-schooled Algerians…) obviously
defies this expectation. Within the text type conventions of English, this is
not infelicitous. To substantiate a claim, the text producer can by all means
opt for another counter-argument (text within text). In Arabic, however,
coherence would most certainly be impaired by such a juxtaposition, and the
translator would thus need to dispell this incongruity. This may be achieved
by transforming the micro-balance
(Some 180,000 well-schooled
Algerians…, Yet…) into a lopsided format in Arabic.
Sample 8.5
is a formal
back-translation of a suggested Arabic rendering of the relevant portion of
Sample 8.4
above:
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
