Mohammed Farghal
Biographic Data
| ID | 1090829 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mohammed Farghal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mohammed |
| FAMILY NAME | Farghal |
| SIGNATURE | FARGHAL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Kuwait University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5012-8550 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Machine vs. human translation of political idioms into Arabic
This study compares translating English political idioms into Arabic by human translation (HT), Google Translate (GT), and ChatGPT (GPT). The corpus consists of one 100 idioms extracted from Hilary Clinton’s book Hard Choices, alongside their counterparts from its Arabic translation. The data is categorized and analyzed in terms of four approaches: ideational, functional, formal, and formal/functional, in addition to their combinations. The findi…
Postediting in English-to-Arabic Legal/Political Translation
Based on a freelancer’s initial translations of ten documents in legal and political contexts, this case study offers an analysis of 40 errors from a posteditor’s feedback on them. House’s (2015) Translation Quality Assessment Model is used to analyze translation errors into overt and covert errors. The analysis shows 4 error types: terminological errors (8/20%), breaches of target language system errors (13/33%), slight changes in meaning errors…
Netflix versus Google Translate
This study examines Netflix and Google Translate’s renditions of English scatological taboo expressions into Arabic. The corpus consists of 110 items extracted from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. The findings reveal that Netflix prioritizes cultural sensitivity and appropriateness by employing understatement (58.18%), explicitation (27.27%), and omission (14.55%) as subtitling procedures to either tone down or eliminate scatological offending…
Written vs. cinematic translation
This study investigates the translation of shared culture-bound expressions in the English version of the Arabic novel The Yacoubian Building and its subtitled film adaptation. A total of 50 expressions found in both the written text (RT) and the cinematic text (CT) are identified and classified into four thematic categories: swearing, idiomatic/proverbial, religious, and address expressions. The analysis examines the use of three translation str…
A Cogno-Prosodic Approach to Translating Arabic Poetry into English
This study offers a schema-theoretic framework for comprehending the translation process of classical Arabic poetry into English, highlighting the significance of schematic ideation in the target text and schematic comprehension in the source text. Four categories of schemata are distinguished in this model: culture-free, culture-bound, culture-sensitive, and language-bound. These four schematic categories are used to evaluate human, ChatGPT, and…
Translating Idioms in Political Discourse
This study examines the Arabic translation of 165 English idiomatic expressions in political interviews in terms of Baker’s translation strategies (2018) and investigates the deployment of idiomatic expressions in terms of semantic category based on Fernando (1996) and Kovacs (2016). The corpus of the study consists of 17 political interviews conducted in English by King Abdullah II from 2013 to 2023 and translated officially into Arabic. The res…
Subtitling humour genres and translation strategies
THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN RETRACTED DUE TO THE BREACH OF ACADEMIC STANDARDS
A Semiotic Approach to Translating between Arabic and English
Drawing on Arabic authentic excerpts that feature key semiotic signs in English translation, this paper shows how challenging it is for translators to capture the communicative value of such signs. The discussion shows that signs have two important components: iconic and indexical. In a few cases in which a happy coincidence may exist in the language pair, the translator can relay both components and, optimally, capture the semiotics of the sign.…
Translating classical Arabic verse
Classical Arabic poetry is a sophisticated and complex art form, combining intricate themes with refined stylistic forms. This paper examines the translation of 15 individual Classical Arabic verses by comparing the English renditions provided by a human translator and two prominent large language models (LLMs), namely Google’s Gemini (GEM) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT (GPT). The human and LLMs are evaluated in relation to three variables: thematic clari…
Marriage Parties, Rules, and Contract Expressions in Qur’an Translations
Marriage is one of many important topics discussed in the Qur’an and is a vital component of the customs and traditions of every community. This study aims to qualitatively investigate the procedures employed by classical and recent translators in rendering Qur’anic marriage expressions into English and see whether there has been improvement in tackling them. The collected data consists of a set of marriage expressions that are critically analyze…
English dog expressions
The present study aims to examine dog expressions in English in terms of categorisation, structure, attitude, semantic molecules, and translatability. This paper shows that the richness of English dog expressions qualifies the conceptual metaphor HUMANS are DOGS at a status comparable to that of the universal conceptual metaphor HUMANS are ANIMALS. The data in this study consists of 110 English dog expressions, a large sample that may not exhaust…
A Joke Off-hand
Based on a sample of 75 Jokes extracted from YouTube clips which belong to a comic program called ‘A Joke Off-hand’, different Jordanian male age-groups are shown to highly welcome, appreciate, and interact with joke telling in public. The topics of jokes are varied, mainly involving hash-addict (26.66%), marriage (16%), body defects (6.66%), and school (6.66%) jokes. The total absence of political jokes and the very few sexual and religious joke…
Codeswitching in Arabic reality food competition shows through the lens of partial subtitling
Localized reality television competitions centering on food merge language and food to express the emotional depth that stems from identity.While many have examined the relationship between food and identity and language and identity separately, few have combined the two.Thus, this paper aims to study the cases of codeswitching (CS) in Arabic food competitions.The research is qualitative and quantitative in nature.Selected episodes of the Middle …
Translating Arabic Metaphorical Expressions into English
The objective of this study is to examine Arabic metaphorical expressions in English translation with an eye to exploring the coding of such expressions, the procedures employed in rendering them, and the treatment of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic parameters in translation. The corpus consists of 100 Arabic metaphorical expressions extracted from Najeeb Mahfouz’s (1987) novel ḥadiiθ al-ṣbaaḥwa-l-masaa’ along with their English counterparts in …
English Adverbial and Determiner Negation
Negation hardly comes up as an issue in English-Arabic translation studies. The general assumption is that the translation of English negation into Arabic poses no serious problems to the translator. While this is generally true when it comes to rendering negation marked by generic negative particles/affixes (John is not happy and John is unhappy, respectively) and even lexical and rhetorical implicit negation (John denied having cheated on the t…
English Focus Structures in Arabic Translation
The present paper aims to examine the translation of English focus structures into Arabic. The textual data is extracted from Gibran Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, being a good example of creative writing that may instantiate sufficient data of such structures. The extracted data (88 examples) feature four categories of focus structures: fronting (27), fronting plus subject-verb inversion (23), fronting plus subject-auxiliary inversion (28) and It-…
Basic Issues in Translator Training with Special Reference to Arab Universities1
The paper will address the status quo of student translator training programs in the Arab world by looking at the practical and theoretical dimensions of translation studies as an emerging discipline. It aims to offer a set of principles and guidelines whose presence seems indispensable. First, an introductory word is said about nature of human communication, nature of translation, translation programs, translation equivalence, and context in tra…
Compliment Behaviour in Bilingual Kuwaiti College Students
The analysis of compliment responses in a number of languages has attracted a growing research interest and information is already available on how native speakers of English and Arabic respond. This allows for the prediction of certain cross-linguistic pragmatic differences that might characterise compliment responses in the case of Arabic-speaking EFL students. Rather than engage in speculation on the matter, the present study investigates this…
Accidental Humor in International Public Notices Displayed in English
This paper examines accidental humor as it manifests itself in international public notices displayed in English. It shows that accidental humor, just like intentional humor, essentially stems from script opposition and script overlap (Raskin, 1985). However, it lacks intentionality, which plays a key role in contrived humor. In this way, accidental humor is based on the interaction between the text and the receiver, apart from the producer. In p…
Arabic Euphemism in English Translation
The present study aims to address the translatibilty of Arabic euphemisms into English by investigating Arabic euphemizing strategies and their potential English counterparts. It establishes the construct that euphemism is a pragmatic feature with translational relevance that concerns the degree of politeness between SL and TL. Arabic and English are shown to largely operate comparable strategies including meataphorical expressions, circumlocutio…
The tag and everything revisited
The paper first reviews previous analyses of the English tag and everything , which have shown the tag to function at both the semantic and pragmatic levels. A comparison is made between English and everything and the Arabic tag u-kulši , and it is pointed out that, while both English and Arabic versions mark the preceding conjunct as a member of a set, the Arabic tag can be used in such a way that the set being alluded to is not specified but is…
Two Thirds of a Boy are his Uncle's'
The present paper is an attempt to show that translation activity is a matter of translating what is contextually relevant in terms of source text and audience, and ignoring what is contextually irrelevant. Successful intralingual communication is essentially dependent on the receiver's recognition of the sender's communicative intention with reference to optimal relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986). However, interlingual communication may create …
Arabic Conservatism versus English Openness
The paper shows that Arabic conservatism contrasts sharply with English openness. While English opens up freely to colloquial varieties as well as other languages of the world, Arabic retreats to itself in search of purity of expression. It is argued that the roots of this contrast have more to do with different linguistic traditions than the real state-of-affairs. In particular, the tendency of English, as opposed to Arabic, for description rath…
Schemata and lexis in translation
The present article provides empirical evidence for a schematic model of translation in which markedness plays a central role. An ambiguous text was given two different titles that called for schematically different translations. Regardless of their lexical competence, most translation students and teachers who participated in the study opted for the unmarked schema in the text although this conflicted with the schema marked in the title. It ther…
Managing in Translation
The present paper aims to shed light on the notion of managing in the process of translating. It firmly distinguishes between two types of managing: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic managing. Intrinsic managing, on the one hand, is entailed by the numerous asymmetries existing between the SL and TL, thus aiming to bring about natural naturalations. Extrinsic managing, on the other hand, is the translator's ideological superimposition on the SL text, thus …
Jordanian college students' responses to compliments
Colloquial Jordanian Arabic tautologies
The pragmatics of ’inšāllah in Jordanian Arabic
Lexical and Discoursal Problems in English-Arabic Translation
À partir de l'étude des résultats d'un examen de traduction, l'auteur examine cinq problèmes, lexicaux et/ou discursifs, dans la traduction anglais-arabe. Il démontre qu'un traducteur professionnel doit prendre un grand nombre de décisions afin de produire un équivalent traductionnel et que celles-ci sont souvent ignorées par les apprentis traducteurs qui, en général, se limitent à leurs dictionnaires pour trouver des solutions
Reader responses in quranic translation
This article deals with reader responses to select translations of Quranic verses that involve referential gaps. Based on the results obtained from two types of questionnaire (an open form and a closed form), the study shows that referential gaps may cause serious problems to native speakers of English when they interpret Quranic messages in translation. Further, open form questionnaires prove to be more indicative of readers' comprehension of Qu…
Pragmareligious failure in translating Arabic politeness formulas into English
Article Pragmareligious failure in translating Arabic politeness formulas into English: Evidence from Mahfouz’s Awlad Haritna was published on January 1, 1997 in the journal Multilingua (volume 16, issue 1)
Targeting lexicon in interpreting
The present study shows that student interpreters in the Master's Translation Program at Yarmouk University (Jordan) suffer serious deficiencies in English language proficiency in general and lexical competence in particular when interpreting from Arabic into English. The results of the renditions of ten subjects indicate that 70% of the renderings of 8 lexical items in an Arabic newspaper editorial were inappropriate. The inappropriate rendering…
Colloquial Jordanian Arabic tautologies
Jordanian Arabic between diglossia and bilingualism
Targeting lexicon in interpreting
The present study shows that student interpreters in the Master's Translation Program at Yarmouk University (Jordan) suffer serious deficiencies in English language proficiency in general and lexical competence in particular when interpreting from Arabic into English. The results of the renditions of ten subjects indicate that 70% of the renderings of 8 lexical items in an Arabic newspaper editorial were inappropriate. The inappropriate rendering…
The pragmatics of ’inšāllah in Jordanian Arabic
Pragmareligious failure in translating Arabic politeness formulas into English
Article Pragmareligious failure in translating Arabic politeness formulas into English: Evidence from Mahfouz’s Awlad Haritna was published on January 1, 1997 in the journal Multilingua (volume 16, issue 1)
Grammatical voids
The present study deals with grammatical voids from a translational perspective. It argues that, just like referential and lexical voids, grammatical voids may give rise to serious problems if disregarded. However, whereas the translators’ awareness of referential and lexical voids is so high in translation circles that differing translation strategies have been recommended for dealing with them such as borrowing, literal translation, descriptive…
Translational Miscues in Modern Arabic Verse
Historically, the term 'miscue' was first employed by Goodman (1962) where he develops a system for comparing expected oral reading responses with observed oral reading responses. His system is concerned with meaning and how it changes when miscues occur both at the word and sentence levels. To show the importance of miscues, he argues that the written language becomes parallel to the oral language in a literate society. To him, reading (the proc…
Reader responses in quranic translation
This article deals with reader responses to select translations of Quranic verses that involve referential gaps. Based on the results obtained from two types of questionnaire (an open form and a closed form), the study shows that referential gaps may cause serious problems to native speakers of English when they interpret Quranic messages in translation. Further, open form questionnaires prove to be more indicative of readers' comprehension of Qu…
Jordanian college students' responses to compliments
Managing in Translation
The present paper aims to shed light on the notion of managing in the process of translating. It firmly distinguishes between two types of managing: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic managing. Intrinsic managing, on the one hand, is entailed by the numerous asymmetries existing between the SL and TL, thus aiming to bring about natural naturalations. Extrinsic managing, on the other hand, is the translator's ideological superimposition on the SL text, thus …
When the Focus of the Text is Blurred
This study aims to investigate the effect of missing the pragmatic impact of two textual components, viz., conjunctives and key lexical items, on the typological focus of the source text in the process of simultaneous interpreting from Arabic into English. The source text assumes a hortative function which calls into the recipient's active socio-historical memory, events and experiences comparable to those addressed in the text. The investigation…
Situational and discoursal social honorifics in Jordan
Article Situational and discoursal social honorifics in Jordan: an empirical study was published on October 24, 2002 in the journal International Journal of the Sociology of Language (volume 2002, issue 158)
Lexical and Discoursal Problems in English-Arabic Translation
À partir de l'étude des résultats d'un examen de traduction, l'auteur examine cinq problèmes, lexicaux et/ou discursifs, dans la traduction anglais-arabe. Il démontre qu'un traducteur professionnel doit prendre un grand nombre de décisions afin de produire un équivalent traductionnel et que celles-ci sont souvent ignorées par les apprentis traducteurs qui, en général, se limitent à leurs dictionnaires pour trouver des solutions
Arabic Conservatism versus English Openness
The paper shows that Arabic conservatism contrasts sharply with English openness. While English opens up freely to colloquial varieties as well as other languages of the world, Arabic retreats to itself in search of purity of expression. It is argued that the roots of this contrast have more to do with different linguistic traditions than the real state-of-affairs. In particular, the tendency of English, as opposed to Arabic, for description rath…
Schemata and lexis in translation
The present article provides empirical evidence for a schematic model of translation in which markedness plays a central role. An ambiguous text was given two different titles that called for schematically different translations. Regardless of their lexical competence, most translation students and teachers who participated in the study opted for the unmarked schema in the text although this conflicted with the schema marked in the title. It ther…
Two Thirds of a Boy are his Uncle's'
The present paper is an attempt to show that translation activity is a matter of translating what is contextually relevant in terms of source text and audience, and ignoring what is contextually irrelevant. Successful intralingual communication is essentially dependent on the receiver's recognition of the sender's communicative intention with reference to optimal relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986). However, interlingual communication may create …
Arabic Euphemism in English Translation
The present study aims to address the translatibilty of Arabic euphemisms into English by investigating Arabic euphemizing strategies and their potential English counterparts. It establishes the construct that euphemism is a pragmatic feature with translational relevance that concerns the degree of politeness between SL and TL. Arabic and English are shown to largely operate comparable strategies including meataphorical expressions, circumlocutio…
The tag and everything revisited
The paper first reviews previous analyses of the English tag and everything , which have shown the tag to function at both the semantic and pragmatic levels. A comparison is made between English and everything and the Arabic tag u-kulši , and it is pointed out that, while both English and Arabic versions mark the preceding conjunct as a member of a set, the Arabic tag can be used in such a way that the set being alluded to is not specified but is…
Compliment Behaviour in Bilingual Kuwaiti College Students
The analysis of compliment responses in a number of languages has attracted a growing research interest and information is already available on how native speakers of English and Arabic respond. This allows for the prediction of certain cross-linguistic pragmatic differences that might characterise compliment responses in the case of Arabic-speaking EFL students. Rather than engage in speculation on the matter, the present study investigates this…
Accidental Humor in International Public Notices Displayed in English
This paper examines accidental humor as it manifests itself in international public notices displayed in English. It shows that accidental humor, just like intentional humor, essentially stems from script opposition and script overlap (Raskin, 1985). However, it lacks intentionality, which plays a key role in contrived humor. In this way, accidental humor is based on the interaction between the text and the receiver, apart from the producer. In p…
Basic Issues in Translator Training with Special Reference to Arab Universities1
The paper will address the status quo of student translator training programs in the Arab world by looking at the practical and theoretical dimensions of translation studies as an emerging discipline. It aims to offer a set of principles and guidelines whose presence seems indispensable. First, an introductory word is said about nature of human communication, nature of translation, translation programs, translation equivalence, and context in tra…
English Focus Structures in Arabic Translation
The present paper aims to examine the translation of English focus structures into Arabic. The textual data is extracted from Gibran Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, being a good example of creative writing that may instantiate sufficient data of such structures. The extracted data (88 examples) feature four categories of focus structures: fronting (27), fronting plus subject-verb inversion (23), fronting plus subject-auxiliary inversion (28) and It-…
English Adverbial and Determiner Negation
Negation hardly comes up as an issue in English-Arabic translation studies. The general assumption is that the translation of English negation into Arabic poses no serious problems to the translator. While this is generally true when it comes to rendering negation marked by generic negative particles/affixes (John is not happy and John is unhappy, respectively) and even lexical and rhetorical implicit negation (John denied having cheated on the t…
Translating Arabic Metaphorical Expressions into English
The objective of this study is to examine Arabic metaphorical expressions in English translation with an eye to exploring the coding of such expressions, the procedures employed in rendering them, and the treatment of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic parameters in translation. The corpus consists of 100 Arabic metaphorical expressions extracted from Najeeb Mahfouz’s (1987) novel ḥadiiθ al-ṣbaaḥwa-l-masaa’ along with their English counterparts in …
English dog expressions
The present study aims to examine dog expressions in English in terms of categorisation, structure, attitude, semantic molecules, and translatability. This paper shows that the richness of English dog expressions qualifies the conceptual metaphor HUMANS are DOGS at a status comparable to that of the universal conceptual metaphor HUMANS are ANIMALS. The data in this study consists of 110 English dog expressions, a large sample that may not exhaust…
Linguistics (31 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Translation Studies and Practices (24 works) · Arabic (21 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Natural language processing (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Artificial Intelligence (10 works) · Swearing, Euphemism, Multilingualism (10 works)