Translating Le Monde and El País English Business Loan Terms into Arabic: A Corpus-based Analysis
Mohamed M. Mostafa · Journal of Language Teaching and Research · 2015
A major trend in corpus linguistics has been the use of highly specialized corpora to achieve several different purposes, including teaching technical writing, language learning, and teaching translation techniques. This study aims to design and use corpora in order to aid translators master the translation of English business terms used routinely in Le Monde and El Pais into Arabic. The Le Monde corpus included 456,122 words, while the El Pais corpus included 874,687. Corpora satisfied several rigorous criteria such as authorship, topic, genre and register. Since translators need a variety of reference sources in order to come up with quality translations, concordance, collocation, and word cluster analyses were performed to reveal how different language patterns are used in their usual contexts. We found that corpora might help translators in navigating across various possibilities of terminologies and expressions, which have to be first decoded prior to being re-coded into the target language. Corpora examples also make the target text more successful in cross-cultural communication contexts.