Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Translation No.4 May, 2015 Pp. 88-112
Arabic Terminology in the Translation of Multimedia Environmental Texts
Pamela Faber
University of Granada, Spain
Nassima Kerras
University of Granada, Spain
Abstract:
This article analyzes scientific terms and phrases in a set of audiovisual texts on the environment, which were translated from English/French into Arabic. With a view to profiling sociocultural aspects specific of speaker communities and clarifying how this can affect the terminology in environmental texts, we studied terminological variation in Arab countries, which is strongly influenced by languages such as English and French. The objective was to analyze the terminological designations of environmental concepts and their possible connotations. The study examined specific characteristics of the corpus audiovisual texts (Díaz Cintas, 2007) and the choice of terms in each context, depending on the group of receivers in the target culture. For this purpose, we described the terminology used as well as the images, music, and color, as a means of conveying extra-textual meaning. This is all performed within the framework of semantic context as reflected in the collocations of the Arabic terms (Cabré, 2004).
Key words: Arabic, environment, pragmatic meaning, specialized multimedia texts, terminology