Constrastive linguistics

There is something strange about the way English pronunciation skills are taught and learnt in India. English is learnt as a second language by almost all Indians except a tiny minority of Anglo-Indians. Naturally, L1 influence (if not interference) on the learning of English in the Indian context is inevitable. As a result, Indian accent has become marked. Deviations can be assessed only in relation to some native variety like RP that is used as a pedagogical framework in India. A study and knowledge of the phonological system of both English and Indian languages is useful to both teachers and students of English from the pedagogical point of view. This paper makes an attempt to contrast RP and the Tamilized English and thereby foreground the deviations. This might perhaps motivate students and help teachers of English in Tamil Nadu to evolve strategies to approximate their pronunciation skills to the Received Pronunciation.

This paper is concerned with the investigation into and the translation of certain problematic cases of exophoric/endophoric reference– with particular reference to 'dummy pronouns'¬– in two modern-phrased translations of the Quranic text; a translation-oriented text analysis approach is adopted. Namely, these two are The Gracious Qur’an: A Modern-phrased Interpretation in English by Ahmad Zaki Hammad, published in 2006 (edition used is that of 2008) and The Qur’an by Saheeh International, published in 1997 (a revised edition of 2004).
Certain problematic cases of reference are observed within the range of the present paper to cause real translational dilemmas for translators: sometimes the referent is not only ‘questionable’ pushing the translator to make critical decisions that can result in mistranslations and/or mistakes, but it can be both anaphoric and cataphoric within its micro context as well; even a multi-referent/dummy pronoun. In such a case, the translator is supposed to make a decision that solves the problem and does not affect the communicativeness of the context at the same time. Still, reference ambiguity, in such cases, does have a subtle function and/or purpose that cannot be conveyed in the translation process due to the morpho-syntactic yet pragma-semantic differences between English and Arabic. In this case, the problem is not with the translators, but the problem, as it were, is with the target language norms and/or traditions.
The ultimate objective of this paper, inasmuch as the researcher endeavours to answer its respective research questions, is to give insight into such morpho-syntactic yet pragma-semantic translational problems of reference, on the one hand, and to reach a conclusion of avail to practising translators, on the other hand, eschewing respective translation loss in the examples selected as well as in similar ones.
Keywords: exophoric, endophoric, dummy, reference, Quranic translations

This paper is concerned with the investigation into English and Arabic poetic/expressive language functions through proposing a new approach to the translation of the genre of poetry, both in theoretical and practical terms. Given the fact that the translation of poetry is known to be an arduous translational task, as authorities and, further, practising translators emphasize, the researcher here argues that dividing poetic texts up into their intralinguistic-extralinguistic components on the levels of genre, meaning and form, in addition to categorizing them are believed to be of great avail when translating poetry lyrically into a target language (TL) as a ‘metanarrative’ (an explanatory product here) reported about a ‘narrative’ in the source language (SL). This, the researcher has argued, can help strike a balance between the poetic language musicality and the levels of ‘meaning’ and ‘genre’, where all are to be approached in terms of the interdisciplinarity that marks translation, generically, as a branch of knowledge, taking into account the present paper provides practical examples of English poetry with their respective Arabic translations, recited/sung by the researcher himself (documented throughout this paper via soft/online audio material), hence the practicality and credibility of the theoretical part of the research. The paper also holds both the text (in writing) and its recitation (in audio) as one indivisible translation unit/entity, yielding, in turn, a two-layer metanarrative translation (as documented via multimedia links). This has been taken as central to the research hypothesis and, then, proved as a paramount researching result of the translational ‘narrative’/‘metanarrative’ relationship within the translation process⸺ to say nothing of a proposed interdisciplinary text-music semiotics perspective.
Keywords: two-layer metanarrative, language musicality, poetic translation

Present work sketches a brief historic perspective of Machine Translation (MT) application within natural languages. It explores different types of translation approaches. Therefore, to comprehend the application of Machine Translation practically, Arabic and English languages were for study. However, the relation of translation between Arabic and English languages is dated back to early its eras of 1950s in USA. The history of machine translation has witnessed a continuous flux of successes and fails. After 1980s, the situation of translating English to Arabic languages experienced a remarkable era. Many of the achievements have been witnessed through various contributions from different academic disciplines. This paper has briefly stated about the contributions made in domains of constructive translation models, machine translation systems and computer software. It further explores about the true resources of online translation assistance for natural languages in shape of online and manual dictionaries as a practical representation to a conceptual framework of translation models that promotes its functionality worldwide. The significance of present study lies within a fact that it explicitly shows a hierarchal lineage of both languages taken as a sample of study. Secondly, the lingual characteristics of English and Arabic languages compared to each other that connect application with some challenges that are raised because of their striking contrasts. However, it gives an impetus for future researchers from various disciplines to explore many subtle paradigms within their respective subjects.

Using translation in foreign language teaching has been a rather controversial topic in recent times. While translation was generally accepted as a regular teaching method up to the 18th century, the trend slowly reversed to a merely monolingual approach during the 19th century. In the last two decades, however, the bilingual approach is again given more attention and possibilities of combination are increasingly being discussed.
This paper aims at demonstrating how integrating translation into L2 learning by the example of Arabic can help learners to better learn the language, master its particularities and grasp a better understanding of the language right from the beginning, especially when it comes to syntax, grammar, and phraseology. For autonomous learning, relevant motivation theories in teaching and learning are highlighted and a strategy in order to benefit from translation in self-learning is being suggested.