A Comparative Study of Reference and Conjunction As Cohesive Devices in Two English Texts , Their Translated Versions , and Two Original Arabic Texts

Abstract

This paper is a comparative analysis of two English texts ,their Arabic translated versions and two original Arabic texts . The focus is on reference and conjunction as cohesive devices and the shifts that may occur when translating literary texts due to differences in the grammatical systems of the source ( English ) and the target (Arabic ) language . It shows the translation strategies that translators use in transferring referential cohesion and conjunctions from an English literary text to its Arabic translated version . Also, it identifies the frequency of occurrence of both reference pronouns and conjunctions in all those six texts . To achieve these aims , two English texts have been translated by a professional translator , Safaa Kalusee, who is a well – known translator in Iraq .The first corpus is " A Letter of Condolescence " by Charles Dickens and the second is Miltons poem " Lycidas " . The four texts have been compared to show those shifts in translation .Also , two original Arabic texts have been analysed in terms of reference and conjunction . The first text is A Letter of Condolescence and the second is a poem written by AL- Mutanaby. In addition , a statical study is made to show the difference in the frequency of reference pronouns and conjunctions in all six texts . The first hypothesis is that the linking devices are more implicit in the target text (Arabic ) than in the source one (English ) . This is because of the agglutinating and inflecting nature of the target text as compared to the source one .The second hypothesis is that the two cohesive devices in the target texts are less common than those in the source texts and their frequency in the original Arabic texts is unequal . The results have shown that reference and conjunction are utterly affected in the Arabic target text and their frequency in the original texts depend on the type of the text it self i.e whether it is a poem , a letter , anovel , ........ etc.