Chesterman’s Syntactic Strategies for Retaining Parallelism in the Arabic-English Translation : 'A Dialogue with an Atheist' as a Model

Abstract

The current study examines translation strategies for retaining parallelism in Dr. Mostafa Mahmoud's book A Dialogue with an Atheist . The study draws on a theoretical Framework of Andrew Chesterman (2016) syntactic strategy model for analyzing the data. The objective of the study is to investigate how parallelism in Arabic version is dealt with in its translation into English. The frequency of occurrence of parallelism is calculated to highlight the extent to which the English translation has retained a similar use of parallelism to achieve a similar impact on the readers. The results reveal that ten strategies are employed: literal translation, loan translation, transposition, unit shift, phrase structure change, clause structure change, sentence structure change, cohesion change, level shift and scheme change to maintain parallelism in the English translation of the book. Moreover, it has been found that literal translation (25%), cohesion change (22%) and scheme change (11.4%) are most widely used strategies to retain the parallel structures. The translator succeeded in maintaining the original text and conveying the style and emotion of the author. The study concluded that the translator should not only have command of both languages involved but should also be well-informed with the style of the writer or philosopher. In fact, in literary translation the translator faces the challenges of handling two translation principles: transferring an unaltered message and preserving the style of the writer. Further research is suggested to involve more analysis of Chesterman's translation model to investigate the semantic and pragmatic types used in the book.