TRANSLATING THE DISCOURSE OF ALIENATION ORWELL’S NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR AND HAQQI’S SAINT’S LAMP AS CASE STUDIES by LOUBNA AMMER A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the American University of Sharjah College of Arts and Sciences in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Translation and Interpreting Sharjah, United Arab Emirates December, 2012 © 2014 Loubna Hamed Ammer. All rights reserved. Approval Signatures We, the undersigned, approve the Master’s Thesis of [Loubna Hamed Ammer]. Thesis Title: Translating The Discourse Of Alienation/ Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four And Haqqi’s Saint’s Lamp Signature Date of Signature (dd/mm/yyyy) ___________________________ _______________ [Name] [Academic title] Thesis Advisor ___________________________ _______________ [Name] [Academic title] Thesis Committee Member ___________________________ _______________ [Name] [Academic title] Thesis Committee Member ___________________________ _______________ [Name] [Program/Department, Coordinator/Director/Head] ___________________________ _______________ [Name] [CAS/CEN/CAAD Graduate Programs Director] ___________________________ _______________ [Name] Dean of College/School ___________________________ _______________ Dr. Khaled Assaleh Director of Graduate Studies Acknowledgments I will always be thankful to Turjuman Training Program, sponsored by the Mohammad Bin Rashid Foundation. It was this event that introduced me to the excellent MATI program of the American University of Sharjah. At the outset, I wish to thank my supervisor and mentor Dr. Basil Hatim for opening my eyes to a world of possibilities within translation, and for introducing me to new ways of thinking about translation. For his passionate and hearty ways of teaching, I will always be grateful. Equally sincerely, I would like to say thank you to all my MATI professors for their help and guidance, and to all my friends and MATI colleagues for their warmth and supportiveness. Fondly and on a personal note, my love and gratitude go to my husband for his patience and unconditional support. I could have never done this without you by my side. Last but never the least, I would like to thank my children Adam and Sarah for being part of my MATI journey and for understanding that mommy has to do this, and to my family in Syria for their love and prayers. Dedication To my father, I hope I’ve done you proud… Abstract “A basic property of language is that it enables its users to formulate a mental picture of reality and to make sense of and express what goes around and inside them” (Hatim, 1997, p. 179). This research is aimed at investigating those linguistic functions that are particularly productive in creating a discourse of ‘alienation’. A more specific aim is to assess the extent to which these discursive forms and functions have been preserved in translation into and out of Arabic, and what kind of translation strategies have been used to achieve this. To pursue these research goals, the textual, interpersonal and ideational metafunctions are taken as a starting point, with a particular focus on the system of transitivity, an aspect of the ideational domain that is primarily concerned with reflecting ‘experiential meanings’. The investigation of the transitivity system and its discursive implications is supplemented by investigating other syntactic devices such as the passive voice, depersonalization, negation and nominalization. The textual data analyzed include passages from the controversially futuristic novel Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell and from the modern Arabic novella The Saint’s Lamp by the Egyptian writer Yahya Haqqi. Both novels are saturated with themes of alienation, estranged mind style and undermined agency in an environment where inanimate objects seem to be the actual initiators of actions as if they have claimed the human characteristic of will and power to themselves. Through a careful assessment of source and target texts, this research will show how efficient the various ‘syntactic devices’ have been in creating a discourse of alienation, and how effective the various translation strategies adopted have been in preserving the ultimate effect. The overall objective is to identify a number of methods that would enhance the performance of translators dealing with sensitive texts that are discursively marked. Search Terms: Discourse of alienation, translation, Systemic Functional Linguistics, transitivity, Micheal Halliday, totalitarian government. 6 Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMNTS……………….…………………………………………...…….….4 ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………..…….6 LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………….….....……9 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………….….10 CHAPTER TWO: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS………………………………………...……..13 2.1 An Overview…………………………………………………………….....……13 2.2 Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)…………...…………………...…14 2.3 Register Variations and Strands of Meaning…………………………..…18 CHAPTER THREE: SYSTEM OF TRANSITIVITY……………………………….23 3.1 Transitivity in English…………………………………..……………..…23 3.2 Transitivity in Arabic……………………………….…….…………...…30 CHAPTER FOUR: TRANSLATING THE DISCOURSE OF ALIENATION…..…34 4.1The Discourse of Alienation………………………………………………34 4.2 Transitivity and World View…………..…………………………………35 4.3 An Inquiry into the Language of William Golding’s The Inheritors .…...38 4.4 Suppressing Agency in Nineteen Eighty-Four .……………………….…42 CHAPTER FIVE: DATA AND ANALYSIS………………………………………..46 5.1 Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell/ translated by Anwar Al- Shami…………………………………………………………………......47 5.2 Qindeel Umm Hashim (The Saint’s Lamp ) by Yahya Haqqi/ Translated by M. M. Badawi………………………………………………………….…66 CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION………………………………………………...….79 REFERENCES…………………………………...………………………...………...82 APPENDIX A: Passage analyzed from Orwell’s 1984 ……………………..……….84 7 APPENDIX B: Translation of the passage analyzed from Orwell’s 1984 ….……….89 APPENDIX C: Parts of the passage analyzed from Haqqi’s Qindeel Umm Hashim ………………………………………………………………………………..95 APPENDIX D: Translation of provided passages from Haqqi’s Qindeel Umm Hashim ………………………………………………………………………………..97 VITA……………..……………………………………………………..……………99 8 List of Tables Table 1: Examples of intransitive process/action predicate with animate/inanimate doer……………………………………………………………………………...…....48 Table 2: Examples of transitive process/action predicate with animate/inanimate doer……………………………………………………………………………….......51 Table 3: Examples of the agentive/ agentless passive structures……………….……54 Table 4: Examples of Negation……………………………………………...……….58 Table 5: Examples of nominalized verbs…………………………………….………60 Table 6: Examples of using two or more syntactic devices simultaneously…….…...63 Table 7: Examples of intransitive process/action predicate with animate/inanimate doer……………………………………………………………………………….......67 Table 8: Examples of transitive process/ action predicate with animate/ inanimate doer…………………………………………………………………………………...69 Table 9: Examples of the agentive/ agentless passive structures…………………….70 Table 10: Examples of Negation…………………………..…………………..……..72 Table 11: Examples of nominalized structures………………………….…………...73 Table 12: Examples of using the subjunctive mood………………………….....……75 Table 13: Examples of agentive structures by an animate doer……………………...77 9 Chapter One Introduction “Literature is a creative use of language” states Fowler (1996, p. 21). Now, even though literature is not the only form of creativity, people tend to acknowledge it as pretty unique in that it tends to encode experiences in such a way that always leaves the reader inspired, not only by aesthetics alone, but also by knowledge and wisdom. The question that arises here is how literature is able to do so? Or, to put it differently, what kind of linguistic devices are used in creating what, in his definition of discourse, Hatim (1997) terms ‘attitudinal meanings’? To answer this question, Fowler has drawn our attention to the fact that producing a discourse that seems ‘new’ in a special sense is one aspect of literature’s creativity; and this takes us back to Hatim’s perspective on discourse: “discourse is particularly conducive to the expression of attitudinal meanings in general and ideology in particular” (1997, p. 177). To tackle such issues in more precise terms, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) model came to the fore in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. The approach builds on the basic notion that language embodies three strands of meaning: the textual, interpersonal and ideational . These metafunctions encapsulate how language creates and communicates meaning. But these linguistic manifestations cannot be examined in isolation from context with which they are inextricably bound up. This is evident through our ability to identify context from text and to determine what type of language is most appropriate in a certain context (Eggins, 2004). In other words, different kinds of contexts require that one of the three strands of meaning is more prominent than, although not entirely independent from, the other two (Halliday, 2004, et al. ). For example, writing a business letter heavily involves the textual metafunction, but it can also and at the same time involve both the interpersonal and ideational dimensions. Discourse is thus one crucial aspect of context. But discursive activity is too diffuse to be ultimately meaningful by itself. Two communicative ‘vehicles’ come to 10 the rescue: Genres and texts enable discourse to materialize as the underlying theme of a literary work (Hatim,