Bilingual Marketing: Parallel or Mutual Translation?

This seminar is part of the Department of Arabic and Translation Studies (ATS) Research Series, organized by the ATS Research Committee.

Parallel translation is a phenomenon of certain texts (advertisements, brochures, contracts, leaflets, etc.) that have bilingual textual components (Arabic and English) where there are two "sister documents" or two "sister texts" in one document. It is not clear which one is the source text (ST) and which one is the target text (TT), but there is some kind of linguistic parallelism and correspondence that make either text the translation of the other. Both texts can function as the original and the translation at the same time. One cannot tell which one is the ST and which one is the TT unless the author/translator/publisher of the text informs the researcher. It is some kind of "mutual translation" where two texts can function as the ST and TT or both. The texts configuration would lead to certain research and methodology questions as whether this is a translation process in the traditional sense, or a transcreation of some sort, as well as in terms of the role of the text(s), the role of the translator(s)/translation team and corpus building.

Speaker: Dr. Sattar Izwaini, Associate Professor of Arabic and Translation Studies, AUS

PhD in Translation Studies, University of Manchester, UK

Sattar Izwaini has taught languages, linguistics and translation for undergraduate and graduate students in Britain and the Arab World. He has a long professional experience in translation and editing. His research interests include corpus-based translation studies, audiovisual translation, localization, terminology, machine translation, and contrastive linguistics and translation. He has presented research papers at conferences held at the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Lancaster, St. Petersburg and at the Maastricht School of International Communication. He has translated into Arabic works by Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf and Vilhelm Moberg.

For more information, contact [email protected].