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A Study of Humphrey Davies' Arabic-English Translations Of i A Corpus-Driven Investigation of Translator Style: A Study of Humphrey Davies’ Arabic-English Translations of Midaq Alley and The Yacoubian Building Bader Abdulaziz S Altamimi Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Languages, Cultures and Societies Centre for Translation Studies September 2016 ii Declaration The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis maybe published without proper acknowledgement. ©2016 The University of Leeds and Bader Abdulaziz S Altamimi iii Acknowledgements I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to Professor Jeremy Munday who has always been an unfailing source of guidance, motivation and inspiration. Without his meticulous supervision and constant support, I would not have been able to complete this thesis. My heartfelt thanks are also due to Professor James Dickins for his insightful comments and invaluable suggestions. I would like also to thank all my colleagues and friends at the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, for their valuable comments and advice during the various stages of this study. My sincere thanks are also due to George Daniels for his constant help and insightful comments and feedback. My warmest thanks go to my mother and father, and my wife, Arwa Bin Khurayyif, and all members of my family for their continuous support and encouragement. iv Abstract The aim of this study is to isolate the individual stylistic traits of one translator, Humphrey Davies, within the framework of descriptive translation studies. Davies‘ English translation of the Arabic novel Midaq Alley is compared, using a corpus-driven approach based on keyword lists, to another English translation of the same source text by another translator, Trevor Legassick. By making this initial corpus-driven comparison and subsequently generating a keyword list for Davies‘ Midaq Alley, the stylistic features regarded as indicative of the translator style and meriting further investigation declared themselves and, accordingly, hypotheses regarding Davies‘ translator style were constructed and then tested by carrying out a thorough corpus-based investigation. A consistent pattern of choices was identified in the translation of four types of words: culture-specific items, including culture-specific common expressions and proper nouns; terms of respect; reporting verbs and function words, including the contraction ‗‘d‘ and ‗that‘ as complementizer, relativizer, demonstrative pronoun and demonstrative determiner. For lexical words, the results show that Davies‘ tends to transliterate foreign words and supplement them with extratextual gloss, reproduces the structures of proper nouns, preserves the terms of respect by literal translation and translates literally the reporting verbs. Regarding function words, Davies tends to make heavy use of contractions and all types of ‗that‘. Generally, the findings show that Davies stays close to the source text compared to Legassick who moves much further from the source text. The identified stylistic features are investigated in Davies‘ English translation of another Arabic novel (The Yacoubian Building) to check whether these features are stable across one of his other translations. The findings show that most of the features revealed through the comparison of Davies to Legassick are stable across the Davies‘ two translations. Despite limitations, it is anticipated that the approach developed in this study will be fruitfully adapted for further rigorous and replicable analysis of translator style. v Table of Contents Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... v List of Tables...................................................................................................................... x List of Figures ................................................................................................................. xiv Abbreviations ................................................................................................................... xv Arabic Transcription System........................................................................................... xvi Chapter 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................... - 1 - 1. Research questions ..................................................................................................... - 3 - 2. The source texts, their authors and translators ........................................................... - 5 - 2.1. Midaq Alley ........................................................................................................ - 5 - 2.2. The Yacoubian Building ..................................................................................... - 7 - 2.3. Humphrey Davies and Trevor Legassick ............................................................ - 8 - 3. Organization of thesis .............................................................................................. - 11 - Chapter 2 Style, Stylistics, Translator Style and Corpus-based Translation Studies ....... - 15 - 1. Introduction .............................................................................................................. - 15 - 2. Style in original writing ........................................................................................... - 15 - 2.1. Dualism vs. Monism ......................................................................................... - 19 - 2.2. Pluralism ........................................................................................................... - 23 - 2.3. Stylistics ............................................................................................................ - 25 - 2.4. Stylistics: main aims and sub-disciplines .......................................................... - 27 - 2.5. A brief history of stylistics ................................................................................ - 30 - 3. Style in Translation .................................................................................................. - 35 - 3.1. Translator style .................................................................................................. - 37 - 3.1.1. Translator style: different approaches ........................................................ - 39 - vi 3.1.2. Investigating translator style using authorship attribution methods .......... - 53 - 4. Corpus linguistics and translation studies ................................................................ - 56 - 5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................... - 59 - Chapter 3 Methodology: A Corpus-driven Approach to Translator Style ....................... - 63 - 1. Introduction .............................................................................................................. - 63 - 2. Corpus building, design and analysis tools .............................................................. - 63 - 2.1. Analysis tools: WordSmith Tools ..................................................................... - 69 - 3. Corpus analysis ........................................................................................................ - 71 - 3. 1. Corpus-driven approach ................................................................................... - 71 - 3. 2. Data retrieval and method of analysis .............................................................. - 73 - 3.2.1. Phase one: comparing DMA against the reference corpus (LMA) ............ - 73 - 3.2.2. Phase two: identifying the source text‘s equivalents of DMA‘s keywords in both translations ................................................................................................... - 79 - 3.2.3. Phase three: identifying the TT equivalents of every occurrence of the words which are chosen for further investigation in the second phase in both translations .......................................................................................................................... …- 80 - 3.2.4. Phase Four: investigating Davies‘ stylistic features in translation in one of his other translations .................................................................................................. - 85 - 4. Conclusion ............................................................................................................... - 86 - Chapter 4 Culture-Specific Items ..................................................................................... - 89 - 1. Introduction .............................................................................................................. - 89 - 2. Culture and translation ............................................................................................. - 90 - 3. Definitions of culture-specific items ........................................................................ - 93 - 4. Categories of culture-specific items ......................................................................... - 96 - 5. Procedures in translating culture-specific items ...................................................... - 98 - 6. Culture-specific items and their possible
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