Speech Act as a Basis of Understanding Dialogue Coherence with Reference to English-Arabic Translation
Keywords:
Speech acts, Arabic, English, Translation, Coherence, Cultural Divergences, Syntactic Divergences, etc.Abstract
The present study tackles speech act as a basis of understanding dialogue coherence in English and its translation into Arabic. Speech act theory deals with the functions and uses of language; so in the broadest sense, it might be said that speech acts are all the acts we perform through speaking, all the things we do when we speak. This study aims at (1) studying whether Speech Act Theory can be applied to English dialogues, (2) attempting to modify and reframe Searle’s felicity conditions according to the categories of speech acts,(3) translating selected samples so as to show how they are realized in Arabic, (4) comparing source language texts with their renderings to show similarities and differences between them, and (5) showing the type of method that has been followed by BBC. committee for rendering the dialogues under investigation. To achieve the above mentioned aims, the study hypothesizes that: (1) speech acts in English can be translated into Arabic despite the cultural and syntactic divergences between languages in question, (2) both English and Arabic dialogues use a variety of various patterns of speech acts, and (3) there is no one-to-one formal correspondence between speech acts in English and their realizations in Arabic. The study is based on a corpus of (01) exchanges involving speech acts. These utterances are translated by (BBC). Each exchange analysis is in terms of speech act analysis and translation discussion. The main findings the study arrived at are: (1) most of speech acts of the utterances belong to directive and assertive categories thus coherence has been achieved.
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Text Analyzed
BBC English Course: What to Say and Its Rendering
