Recognition and Actualization of Cohesive Actors in English Arabic Translation

This work assumes that the in cohesiveness of some Arabic translations of typical English texts is the outcome of the mismanagement of four interrelated actors at the sentential and textual levels. These are text structure, connectivity, word choice and reordering. It proposes a composite approach showing the need to observe, acknowledge and/or realize the achievement of two or more of these actors at least. To prove that, a number of various and different translators (15) were given a typical English text to translate into Arabic. It has been shown throughout the analysis that most of them ignore or unknowingly select one or more irrelevant factors and the result is incohesive translated text. This work helps student to observe most if not all instrumental aspects of text cohesion in Arabic text .


INTRODUCTION
This paper is an attempt to show that when a translator fails to go over an initial obstacle in a source text while translating, the end-result will be a total incohesive and incoherent translation (textual disconnect). This means it lacks the properties of the two concepts of cohesion and coherence, which are contrasted by Hoey (1991) as follows; "We assume that cohesion is a property of a text and coherence is a facet of the reader's evaluation of a text. In other words, cohesion is objective, capable in principle of automatic recognition, while coherence is subjective and judgement concerning it may vary from reader to reader." In this work, university students on a BA translation program were once asked as part of their daily work to translate into Arabic typical English texts with limited collateral instructor's guidelines, mostly lexicographical. The resultant translation versions are done based on types of instructor's interference throughout the translation process (with limited or no human and\or digital help). When the assignment finished, they were asked to compare their individual works with a model version of the translation. It turned out that the most of the individual translations are incohesive translated texts, obviously with varying degrees. Then when asked to justify their inappropriate works, the most common spontaneous justification is speed, no or limited access to dictionaries, lack of practice and training and limited theoretical text linguistic knowledge. This translation problem, in view of this work, may arise from blind total dependence on dictionary basic meanings of certain expressions coupled with disassociation from the text main the research paper and then extracted a composite approach to deal with the data. Fourth, two translation versions will be selected of two respondents will be analyzed accordingly. For considerations of space and time, this analytical account will not be exhaustive but exclusively relative. In addition, the work will incorporate some remarks about the analysis, the translation and the views of the assessors.
A typical English argumentative text was chose for the analysis. The work has verified the authenticity of the text, the spontaneity of its production, the nativity of the producer and the specialty of the assessors.

THE PROBLEM OF THE TEXT DISCONNECT
This work is of the view that initial uncertainty in the process of the translation and the selection of the nearest probability in translation may lead to total implicit or explicit translated text disconnect. Furthermore, a translation blockage is believed to mean: inability to transcend a translation problem and \or the trial\attempt by the translator to consciously or unconsciously bend the interpretation by drawing on the nearest alternative for speed purposes.
To exemplify this, an advanced translation student was once given a booklet entitled Pregnancy & Work to translate into Arabic, it opens like this: Pregnancy is a natural state not an illness. A healthy pregnant woman can generally do most of the jobs she did before she became pregnant.
Nevertheless pregnancy places extra strain on the working women and steps must be taken to safeguard the unborn child (foetus) The translator's Arabic translation was as follows ‫حيث‬ ‫االمراض.‬ ‫من‬ ‫مرضا‬ ‫وليس‬ ‫الطبيعية‬ ‫الحاالت‬ ‫من‬ ‫حالة‬ ‫هو‬ ‫الحمل‬ ‫قبل‬ ‫بها‬ ‫تقوم‬ ‫كانت‬ ‫التي‬ ‫االعمال‬ ‫ممارسة‬ ‫عموما‬ ‫السليمة‬ ‫الحامل‬ ‫المرأة‬ ‫بإمكان‬ ‫اتخاذ‬ ‫ويجب‬ ‫العاملة‬ ‫المرأة‬ ‫عند‬ ‫التوتر‬ ‫الحمل‬ ‫اماكن‬ ‫تزيد‬ ‫ذلك‬ ‫ومع‬ ‫الحمل.‬ ‫الجنين‬ ‫سالمة‬ ‫لضمان‬ ‫الخطوات‬ Retranslation: Pregnancy is a state of natural states not an illness of illnesses. A healthy pregnant woman can generally do most of the jobs she did before she became pregnant. Nevertheless places of pregnancy increase the strain on the working women and steps must be taken to safeguard the unborn child (foetus). The translation process of this time-pressured translator was initially blocked by the expression "places" and she captured the most probable choice and continued to produce a text-disconnect translation. In this example, the translator drawing on the dictionary primary meaning of the pluralized nominal expression" places", she envisioned" it as the subject of the above sentence. She was further deceived by its non-past tense verb form "stress", which is without the "s" of the third person singular ; a syntactic requirement in this case (she mistakenly observed the English sentence concord).
A reader of the translated text, after having read the first paragraph of the booklet, expects to see details about "the places" mentioned in the concluding sentence of the first paragraph. However, unfortunately that was not the case. Different pregnancy information is mentioned following paragraph that follows, which doesn't meet any reader expectations and makes him or her feel that a mistranslation has been made earlier.
Initial blockage and the resultant translated text disconnect by the time pressured translators are believed in this work to be engendered by lack of linguistic and extra-linguistic familiarity with source and target texts, coupled with premature or immature translation skills.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Cohesiveness and seamlessness of a communicative message are two main norms at least to evaluate a quality of a translated text. Arab grammarians and lexicographers (old and new) have exerted endless effort to draw the attention of text producers to this fact. Al Fairozabadi (1966) touched upon the necessity of text parts visible connectivity and harmony and called it (Sabk) which means to modern Arab grammarians (lexical connectivity). He also claims that to produce a good and comprehensible text, one need to highly observe the invisible or referential relations between the parts of the text. He called this (Habk). Al Jahidh(one of the most famous Arab letter men) ,in his work AlBayyan Waltabeen drew the attention of his audience to the importance of the opening in a literary work: "Arab literary people only choose/select the best of expressions , meanings, pronunciations and guiding openings…….", he claimed. Abdel Maqsood, 2008 ( a bilingual Arab linguist) claimed that the traditional Arab grammarians discuss in depth many linguistic issues concerning poetry at the lexicographical but not textual level like synonymy, equivalence and repetition…………..
He added that cohesion in modern linguistics is the availability of close interrelation among the text parts in a way that there is a relation between each component of the text and the remaining parts. Then and only then the text becomes a unified fabric achieving its aim, and the knowledge background of both the producer and the audience.
Moreover a number of other Arab Bilinguals, like A. Hassan (2005), N.N Al warraki (1995) and Arab grammarians like A. Aflaih (2001) believe that connectivity in Arabic discourse as essential part of cohesiveness is mostly conducted by few reiterative linguistically represented multifunctional radicals like the Waw and the Fa'a. According to them also, explicit and implicit connectivity can be achieved by the causal and/or elaborating connective (ith ‫اذ‬ ), and elaborating connectives like (haithu ‫حيث‬ ) and (Ama‫اما‬ ) The multi-functionality of the Waw is also referred to by another Arab bilingual, A.S Mehdi Ali (2007), when he discussed connectivity in Arabic :( Arabic tends to use reiteratively the Waw as a connector especially at the beginning of the sentence.) This is an example of the waw where it indicates semantic contrast in Arabic discourse: ‫توظيفي‬ ‫ورفض‬ ‫شروطه‬ ‫قبلت‬ Translation: I accepted his conditions and (but) he refused to recruit me.
Most of those who are interested in Arabic connectivity claim that what helps to interpret the contrast in the in sentences like the above besides the waw is the anonymity of the verbs (accepted and refused) as in the above example.
The fa'a, ‫=فاء‬ on the other hand, indicates sequence and used to indicate further details so is the multifunctional connector (haithu))(‫.)حيث‬ As for the other connector (ith=‫,)اذ‬ it indicates future sequence. Indicating a sequence means adding further information of what has been mentioned earlier in a stretch of language, i.e., giving details. The above three connectors, therefore, by functioning as sequence particles are indicating details. They are devoid of the contrastive function while the waw is all-inclusive.
The Arabic connector (Kama=‫,)امك‬ on the other hand, indicates Omni temporal accumulative details according to A. Aflaih (2001) It should be mentioned here that the translator when translating into Arabic is required to depend more on the connector (Waw) merely because of its multifunctional uses. Equally, he\she should be careful when using other connectors mentioned above.
What is more, Arabists like Clive Holes touch upon the following functions of the Waw as mentioned in M. Baker (1992) : 1. temporal sequence 2. simultaneous action 3. semantic contrast 4. semantic equivalence As this work, in terms of translation field, is unidirectional where English represents the source text while Arabic is the target one, it is essential here to review some assumptions by English speaking linguists. These claim that their assumptions to certain extent are universal if certain requirements are met.
As this work is much more interested in showing initial blockages in translated Arabic text from English, most of this work's focus will be on the Arabic language mechanics. However, it will seek help from works in this area over the past decades.
Most of last century linguists who were interested in this area of linguistics believe that cohesion and text structure are mutually inclusive in one way or another and to certain extent their assumptions are universal. These are like Malcolm Coulthard (1977), Teun A. Van Dijk (1977), Erich H. Steiner & Robert Veltman, (1988) -Discourse and Evelyn Hatch, (1992).
Let alone Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Michael Hoey (1983) who went in depth to discuss this issue.
They agreed in some way or another on the cohesion tools and components of the cohesive text: Background (B) Problem (P) Solution (S) and Evaluation (E) Hoey (1983) gives a detailed account of the English text structure and claims that his assumptions about the text structures in English could be universal when they meet some of the cultural environment requirements of achieving the set goals particularly those of persuasion. He presented at least three main types of discourse structures in English. For considerations of space and time as well as the need to avoid repetition, this work is confined its interest to one discourse structure: Generalization ….. Example(s)….. Evaluation (optional).
In simple terms, in this type of discourse, the producer gives a generalization of a certain situation, then supports his\her generalization with related examples and concludes with an evaluation of the situation.
Normally the generalization is not necessarily capsulated in the first sentence of the opening paragraph as some may assume but may be indicated somewhere in the opening paragraph. Any misinterpretation of the opener, therefore, will cause a lot of unneeded blockage and ensuing text disconnect.
As stated earlier the problem stated in this work arises from mistranslating and mishandling the opener of the text causing a text disconnect and flow blockages This work is of the belief that the problem arises from misunderstanding and misinterpreting more or less four interrelated linguistic factors: text structure, text connectivity, equivalent selectivity and sentential and/or textual reordering.
After having discussed views on connectivity and text structure, this research work will turn to the discussion of the other two main obstacles: inappropriateness of word choice and the need for sentential reordering.
Semanticists, like J. Lyons (1977) claim that the majority of expressions in languages have one basic meaning and more than one non-basic meaning. M. Baker (1992) does not go farther than Lyons by claiming that even when a particular form does have a ready equivalent in the target language, there may be a difference in the frequency with which it is used or the purpose for which it is used. This can be noticed for example in the word "country": Basic meaning= a geographical bordered territory ‫)بالد(‬ One non-basic meaning =related to places other than city or town ‫)ريف(‬ Let us take another word "silence" Basic meaning is related to total absence of human voice or sound ‫)صمت(‬ or discontinuity of speaking which is accompanied by calmness Non-basic = stillness or motionlessness which is accompanied by fear ‫)سكون(‬ Other semantic ideas need to be discussed here is of antonyms which have some relation to connectivity According to the Chambers Dictionary (1993) an antonym is a word opposite in meaning of another i.e., a lexeme connotation denotes an idea opposite to a one carried by another lexeme like the word love; Love denotes something opposite to hate. As for the sentential reordering, Vinay and Darbelnet (1958), besides their seven translation techniques, discussed the concepts of dilution\concentration and amplification\ economy which were later further discussed by others like Malone,L (1988). He added other techniques or trajections as he called them. Reordering is one of these, which is usually employed by professional translators for two purposes: to study the finished translated texts and\or to help harmonize the translation.
As for Arab Bilinguals, A.S Mehdi Ali (2007 ) claims that Arab translators resort to reordering "when there are differences between the source and target languages in terms of style and system." Another bilingual Arab linguist F. Mohammed (2015) assumed that the transitive verb "to translate" for example involves three senses. The first one is confined to interlingual communication while the second one has something to do with intralingual communication, which perhaps requires clarifying or paraphrasing. The third one, on the other hand, it is inclusive of both: interlingual and intralingual senses.
After this brief account of assumptions made by specialists and experts in the field, now what is coming next is to shed light on the approach and the data used in the work.

THE DATA
In this work, it has been decided to choose a typical argumentative English text according to relative requirements. In selecting the text, the work observes the following considerations: 1-The authenticity of the English source text 2-The spontaneity of the students translations 3-The verification of the nativity of the Arabic and English speakers 4-The temporal validity of the English text 5-The verification of the skillfulness and experience of the people involved in the translation The data of this work surely is selected to clearly underline the problem stated earlier and is met the above standard requirements in order to come up with plausible concluding remarks. The text chosen is an argumentative passage talking about fear and silence. To avoid repetitiveness and not being exhaustive, a group of 15 translator respondents of three different categories of different academic and professional levels were asked to translate into Arabic the text selected (see Appendices (A, B and C). The categories where translatability is taken for granted are: 1. Translation trainees (fourth year university translation students), 2. Translation post graduates (MA-holders), and 3. Arab bilinguals (university students from Department s of foreign Languages and literature whose program includes translation courses).
Translation versions are examined against a model translation. The latter is made by this author, checked by a wellversed Arabic grammarian, an Arabist and an Arab bilingual.

THE APPROACH
Tier approach has been devised for this work:

1-The text structuring
In this component of the composite approach the work will depend on Hoey's Assumption of text structure: Generalization -examples-evaluation where the sample opens with a generalization.

2-Connectivity:
Here, the work will depend on the various assumptions about connectivity especially on Arabic connectivity mentioned earlier in the review of the literature 3-Word Choice in this part of the approach the work will examine all possible meanings of certain basic expressions in a way that participate in the cohesiveness and seamlessness of the translated Arabic text. This will be done according to assumptions made on the semantics of the expressions and 4-Reordering: This part of the approach will rely on assumptions made about translation need to reshuffle the parts of the linguistic stretch of the language and present it in compliance with the acceptability of the Arab audience Each translated text is meticulously examined and the model translation is provided at the end of the analysis.

THE ANALYSIS
In this part of the work, two Arabic out of the 15 translations are chosen at random to be analyzed in order not to be repetitive and/or exhaustive. Each paragraph of these two texts will be examined according to the extent of observing: -The text structure and the opener at the text level-henceforth TSTR/OpCo -Connectivity at the sentence level-henceforth CON -Word Choice throughout the paragraph-henceforth WC -Reordering at the sentence level within the paragraphhenceforth RE as shown in the following table: For ease of reference, the Arabic translation comes below the English paragraph followed by the table.

Nominal 2 Nominal
After having analyze these two translated texts, the work will provide a model translated Arabic text as mentioned earlier.

Paragraph 1
It is not only in our social life, however, that we dread silence. We love noise more than we know; even no other human being is present for the Arab Translation see appendix A .

Paragraph 2
When we go from the town to live in the country, we deceive ourselves if we think that we are doing so in order to exchange noise for quietness. We go to the country not in order to escape from noise, but in search of a different kind of noise.

Paragraph 3
Noise is companionship and I remember that I, as a child like even the ticking of a clock in the bedroom. There are sounds that are terrifying at night, but they are chiefly so because of the stillness that is broken by them. The breathing of a cow behind a hedge, as you pass along a silent road at mid night, may startle you; but it is not the cow, it is the silence that has startled you.

Paragraph 1
It is not only in our social life, however, that we dread silence. We love noise more than we know; even no other human being is present For the Arabic Translation see appendix B.

Paragraph 2
1. When we go from the town to live in the country, we deceive ourselves if we think that we are doing so in order to exchange noise for quietness. We go to the country not in order to escape from noise, but in search of a different kind of noise.

Paragraph 3
Noise is companionship and I remember that I, as a child like even the ticking of a clock in the bedroom. There are sounds that are terrifying at night, but they are chiefly so because of the stillness that is broken by them. The breathing of a cow behind a hedge, as you pass along a silent road at mid night, may startle you; but it is not the cow, it is the silence that has startled you.

1.
‫يعجبني‬  or the opener as a whole is not recognized or realized, there is a confusion at the level of the connectivity. -This, in turn, will lead to a further confusion at the level of the lexical selectivity. -If observed and considered as a whole, both kinds of confusion either dwindle or disappear -If changes or modifications are made at the intersentential level, confusion may totally disappears As for the three remaining paragraphs what is noticeable is in the second and third parts: -The first part of the paragraph represents the generalization while the second and other remaining parts represent the details -This eases the task of the translator Melone (1988) to select the appropriate connectors and the intended denotations of the source language lexemes -All this will help define the function of the final paragraph where the text evaluates the whole its idea. It has been clear from the above analysis that there is an intervening gap between the opener of the text and the remaining parts of . The translators mistakenly understood the first sentence of the text as an opener while the opener is, indeed, the comparison contained in the first and second sentences. This confusion in the mind of the translator , in turn, leads him\her to select the inappropriate connecter. Furthermore what adds salt to injury is unsuccessful selection of Arabic equivalents for the English lexemes of the text. Therefore, one can claim that four actors are involved in creating that gap: text structure, connectors, equivalents selection and most likely opener components reordering.
Text openers are the key to cohesive, coherent and comprehensible translation. Whenever the translator stumbled at the beginning of the translation, definitely he\she will produce a text disconnect as it has been generally seen in the above translations. It is also evident that mishandling the opener is crucial and decisive and it is the first piece of the Domino Theory: whenever it is wrongly considered, its impact will go further. As for the word choice and reordering, they are less crucial for the following reasons: -In the word choice the basic meaning is inclusive. -In the reordering factor, the inversion is just done for stylistic purposes.
This proves that in translation, text linguistics is highly required to be observed by translators and students of translation need to have some linguistic knowledge about text connectivity and text structures in order to produce comprehensible translated texts.
Needless to say that connectivity is not always explicit in most languages. i.e., -not linguistically represented between sentences and when implicit sometimes it is implied by linguistic entity or entities available e in the text. The mere presence of that entity and the failure to recognize its function poses almost always a blockage for trainees. It hampers their comprehension by offering a range of interpretations and forcing trainees to opt for inappropriate choices.
Not only that, they need to have the knack to be semantically sensitive to select the proper equivalents in the target text. They need to be able to detect one equivalent meaning of the lexeme in the source (basic or non-basic). Antonyms can be indicative of comparison as used to so function in the sentences of the opener of the English text (like silence, noise, dread and favor). The English verb (dread) for instance has a non-basic meaning of strong hatred ‫)يكره(‬ and used with the noun (silence) which has a non-basic meaning ‫.)السكون(‬ So is the verb (favor) which has a secondary meaning ‫.يحب((‬ In this case of anonymity, the translator needs to depend on collocation mechanism in Arabic as in the following table:

Concluding Remarks
• If our analysis is plausible and reasonable and our devised approach is workable, one can come up with following remarks • The intervening gap between the opener of the translated text and its remaining parts is the outcome of an inadequate consideration of four main factors: text structure, connectivity, word choice and (to lesser extent) sentential order in the source text. • The text opener's main idea is not contained just within the borders of its first sentence but sometimes transcends them to include the contents of other interrelated sentences in the opening part of the opener. • The other parts of the text help clearly define the opener's main idea and remove any ambiguity that could be implied by its first sentence.  • Stereotyping about certain types of text openers are almost always misleading and deceptive. • A text disconnect is easily recognizable by the readers of the target language

RECOMMENDATIONS
Translation necessitates that translator is required to -Scrutinize the context "to find out the clues needed in order to extract a unambiguous interpretation from a stretch of language. " (Hassan 2004) -Define the text structure of the text to be translated -Understand the opener of the text because any misinterpreting of the text opener in particular will lead to a translated text disconnect at the levels of connectivity and lexeme selectivity -Carefully select the connectors to be used -Don't stereotype findings about text openers -Avoid creating intervening gap or gaps between the text components -Further improve the translation version, it could be harmless to introduce sentential inversion\reordering