Translation as problems and solutions

"The book will be most useful (to Arab and Arabic speaking students and translators). The examples (of the book) look excellent to me".

(Prof. Peter Newmark, Univ. of Surrey, UK. (Personal correspondence, 26th March 1996)

"I do believe that your book can be very useful in undergraduate Translation courses... in a Contrastive Linguistics course and in a Translation Studies course".

(Prof. Peter Emery, Sultan Qaboos Univ., Oman: 3 May, 2005)

This Special edition of this work on translation is a Textbook and a handbook for university students, trainee translators as well as professional translators. For the first time it approaches the whole subject of translation in wholly practical terms of problems and solutions.

Such a collective down-to-earth, non-dogmatic, simplified approach aims at locating and considering the greatest number of translation problems of different types come across at translating from English into Arabic, regardless of a certain presupposed theory. Possible, practically tested and justified solutions are suggested to all these problems.

The Introduction stirs arguments mainly about the meaning of translation, components of meaning, methods of translation (i.e. literal vs. free translation) juxtaposed, and theoretical background about the approach and methodology of the book.

Chapter One considers in detail GRAMMATICAL PROBLEMS like the translation of modals, questions, negation, word order, nominal vs. verbal sentences, participles, gerunds, adjectives, sentence connectors, etc.

Chapter Two discusses at length the central LEXICAL PROBLEMS of translation such as synonymy, polysemy, collocations, idioms, metaphors, Arabization, political terms, UN acronyms, culture, etc.

Chapter Three is unprecedentedly assigned for the prominent STYLISTIC PROBLEMS of translation, including formality vs. informality, parallelism, ambiguity, passive vs. active style, repetition and variation, redundancy, show of muscles' style, nominalization vs. verbalization style, the style irony, the stylistic functions of punctuation marks, etc.

Chapter Four addresses the fundamental PHONOLOGICAL PROBLEMS of translating sound features and effects, with special focus on the language of poetry.

All these types of translation problems are accompanied by their possible solutions through a mine of translated examples through a well-organized methodology.

This book is an attempt to attack translation problems daringly, openly and unabashedly. with the ultimate objective of defining and at the same time solving most of them in completely practical terms. It is hoped that the achievement of this aim paves the way for easier English-Arabic translation.

Dr. Hasan Ghazala is currently a Professor of Translation and Stylisties at Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah Al-Mukarramah. He published a number of books and articles on both subjects. He is the translator of Peter Newmark's A Textbook of Translation into Arabic (1992/2004/2006), and the author of: Varieties of English Simplified (1994/1999), A Dictionary of Stylistics and Rhetoric (English-Arabic/Arabic-English) (1996), Stylistics, Interpretation and Teaching (1998), Essays in Translation and Stylistics (2004) (Dar El-Ilm Lil-Malayin) and Dar El-Ilm Dictionary of Collocations (English-Arabic) (2007).