Recording of presentation introducing narrative analysis, outlining what it is, why it can be a useful approach, how to do it and where to find out more. Presentation given at methods@manchester seminar at University of Manchester on 4 March 2010.

What is Narrative Analysis

The translator's "invisibility" has become a hot topic of translation studies in recent years.It concerns translation strategies,and it is also closely related to the translator's status.Lawrence Venuti has made systematic studies of the translator's "invisibility" problem,producing unique insights into its root causes and its influences on the translator's status.A critical analysis of Venuti's statements concerned can be inspiring to achieving correct understanding of the necessity,rationality and limitations of the translator's "invisibility",and to taking effective measures to promote the translator's status.

On the Translator's "Invisibility"

The message of the Qurʾān

Word Order in Arabic

Topical structure in news translation has received relatively little attention despite its stated significance in discourse content and in producing functionally adequate translations. Journalists write news stories with a given structure, order, viewpoint and values, which are “transferred” in translation and affect the way topics are organized. This study explores how shifts in topical development in translation influence rhetorical structure and ultimately news content. Using Lautamatti’s Topical Structure Analysis and Bell’s Event Structure Model, the paper describes the translation strategies applied in (re)producing the source text’s topical and event structures in the target language in a corpus of Hungarian–English news texts (the summary sections of analytical news articles). Results show that while translators generally preserve the sources’ structure in translation, in some cases (e.g. sequential topic progression) significant changes occur, altering the status of some information as well as the event structure, thus producing modified news contents. The paper also examines whether the claim that news translation is influenced by norms similar to those regulating news production more generally applies to this news genre, too. Findings suggest that due to the stereotypical features of this genre, the data only partially support this claim.

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News Discourse in Translation: Topical Structure and News Content in the Analytical News Article

Word order in English is relatively fixed and the meaning of a sentence depends on the position of words in that sentence (Biber et al. 1999:898). Arabic, on the other hand, is more flexible as far as word order is concerned, thanks to its elaborate case marking and verb inflection systems. Moving elements within a sentence are called ‘foregrounding’, ‘inversion’, ‘preposing and postposing’ etc., in English and al-Taqdīm wa al-Ta’khīr in Arabic. The Qur’ān, rather than only using unmarked word orders, employs this linguistic feature of altering the order of elements within a clause for certain discursive functions. Drawing on the Arabic balāghah (Arabic art of eloquence) literature, this paper attempts, first, to establish some of the functions that are realised through using marked word order in the Qur’ān and, second, emphasise that word order in the Qur’ān is used to realise specific discursive functions, which should be taken into consideration when translating it into other languages, including English.

Marked word order in the Qur’ān: Functions and translation

Although the overwhelming majority of Muslims are non-Arabic speakers and depend on translations of the Qur’an to access the meaning of the text in their respective languages, their preferences and expectations have not been systematically surveyed. This research, the first of its kind in the area of Qur’an translation, is based on a survey which I have designed and conducted in order to establish what readers of Qur’an translations into English prefer in terms of layout, translation strategies, and the translators’ backgrounds, amongst other things. The survey also gives the respondents the opportunity to offer their recommendations for future Qur’an translations.

Translating the Qur’an into English: Target Readers’ Expectations

The role played by translators for the media is particularly crucial in the construction, promotion and survival of media narratives, since a narrative cannot travel across linguistic and cultural boundaries without the help of translators. This article aims to identify how the Qur’an, and, in turn, Islam and Muslims, are “narrated” in and by the British press. I use LexisNexis newspaper archives to identify the Qur’anic verses repeatedly used by UK national newspapers between 11/9/2001 and 1/9/2016. I then closely examine the newspaper articles featuring the most repeated verse to establish how narrative strategies (selective appropriation, temporality, causal emplotment and relationality) are used to frame the readers’ understanding. By shedding more light on the active role of translation for the media, I hope to raise awareness of the dangers posed by misrepresenting the world’s second largest religion and by accepting what is presented to us as news unquestioningly.

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Ahmed S. Elimam

Papers

Marked word order in the Qur’ān: Functions and translation

Translating the Qur’an into English: Target Readers’ Expectations

Media, Translation and the Construction of the Muslim Image: A Narrative Perspective

A literary critical discourse on quranic history in seventh-century arabia