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

Abstract

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, bilingual lexicography, contrastive studies, political science studies, and cross-language information retrieval. It describes the phases of corpus compilation, and explores the corpus, by way of illustration, to discover the translation strategies used in rendering the Arabic and Islamic culture-specific terms takfîr and takfîrî from Arabic into English and from English into Arabic. The Corpus consists of 351 English and Arabic original documents and their translations. A total of 189 speeches, 80 interviews, and 68 letters, translated by anonymous translators in the Royal Hashemite Court, were selected and culled from King Abdullah II's official website, in addition to the textual material of the English and Arabic versions of His Majesty's book, Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace 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 to facilitate exploration of the parallel corpus. The challenges encountered in corpus compilation were found to be the scarcity of freely available machine-readable Arabic-English translated texts, and the deficiency of tools that process Arabic texts.

Keywords

• Parallel corpus
• Political
• English-Arabic translation
• Corpus compilation
• Challenges