Translation of cognate accusative from Arabic to English: the case of Call of the Curlew

Abstract

The cognate accusative (CA) in Arabic grammar is a unique structure that has no direct equivalent in English. This paper analyses the various strategies and procedures that the translator used to translate CA instances and assesses the success of these strategies. The significance of the study lies in its attempt to explore the complexities inherent in the CA when translated from Arabic into English, as well as the special difficulties accruing to translation because of the grammatical structure being nonexistent in English. The research particularly looks into The Call of the Curlew, the English translation of Taha Hussein’s novel Doa’a Al-Karawn, which serves as a model to analyse the Arabic CAs and their English counterparts. It underscores Taha Hussein’s novel ‘Doa’a Al-Karawn’ as a case study, highlighting the novel’s ‘untranslatable’ label by some scholars due to its intricate linguistic features. To evaluate the naturalness and acceptability of the renditions, a questionnaire that includes six examples is disseminated to 91 translation experts and 18 native English speakers. The results show the difficulties surrounding the translation of the CA as indicated by the translator, who states in the introduction to his translation that Hussein’s literary production has been labelled ‘untranslatable’ by some scholars because of the literary language of the novel. In particular, the study found that the translator used strategies of the use of adverbs, omission, derivation, idiomatic expressions, explanatory translation, nominal descriptive phrases, phrasal verbs, adjectives, addition, prepositional adverbs, and intensifiers, with varying frequencies. The findings indicate that adverbs and omission are the most commonly employed strategies, reflecting the difficulties in conveying the CA’s emphasis and aesthetic function in translation. The study, therefore, concludes with the main strategies used to render this Arabic-specific structure into English based on the analysis of the selected work of literature and the quantitative results of the questionnaire.

Keywords

• Cognate accusative
• translation strategies
• Taha Hussein
• Call of the Curlew
• Doa’a Al-Karawn
• Maria del Mar Sanchez Ramos, Modern Philology, University of Alcala de Henares: Universidad de Alcala de Henares, Spain