ENGLISH-ARABIC POLITICAL PARALLEL CORPUS: CONSTRUCTION, ANALYSIS AND A CASE STUDY IN TRANSLATION STRATEGIES

摘要

This study reports on the construction of a one million word English-Arabic Political Parallel Corpus (EAPPC),which will be a useful resource for research in translation studies, language learning and teaching, bilinguallexicography, contrastive studies, political science studies and cross-language information retrieval. It describesthe phases of corpus compilation and explores the corpus, by way of illustration, to discover the translationstrategies used in rendering the Arabic and Islamic culture-specific terms takfīr and takfīrī from Arabic intoEnglish and from English into Arabic. The Corpus consists of 351 English and Arabic original documents andtheir translations. A total of 189 speeches, 80 interviews and 68 letters, translated by anonymous translators inthe Royal Hashemite Court, were selected and culled from King Abdullah II's official website, in addition to thetextual material of the English and Arabic versions of His Majesty's book, Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit ofPeace in a Time of Peril (2011). The texts were meta-annotated, segmented, tokenized, English-Arabic aligned,stemmed and POS-tagged. Furthermore, a parallel (bilingual) concordance was built in order to facilitateexploration of the parallel corpus. The challenges encountered in corpus compilation were found to be thescarcity of freely available machine-readable Arabic-English translated texts and the deficiency of tools thatprocess Arabic texts.