Search

How legitimacy narratives in conflict zones are constructed and mediated through translation remains largely under-researched. This article investigates the strategies that the United Nations Special Envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, uses to construct narratives of legitimacy for the Houthi movement in his Security Council briefings on the conflict in Yemen and their Arabic translations. Using a combination of a narrative framework, which highlights the notion of agency, and a semiotic model of triadic signification, which highlights motivatedness in signification, this article identifies metonymization as a strategy in constructing such narratives of legitimacy, with three additional sub-strategies of labeling, naming, and selective appropriation. While the Arabic translations are generally faithful to their originals in terms of the strategies used, some demonstrate a remarkable departure from United Nations translation norms. These findings shed light on theoretical issues of translator agency under such norms, and the pedagogical implications of such agency are addressed.

This paper proposes a hybrid approach to the management of stakeholder conflicting expectations in higher education (HE) by combining Stakeholder Theory (ST) and a participatory approach. In this paper, we use an ex post facto approach to retrospectively report Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) experience in managing stakeholder conflicting expectations in developing the BA in English Language and Literature Program as a case study. We show that for an effective management of stakeholder conflicting expectations in HE, the three perspectives of ST (i.e., descriptive, instrumental and normative) have to be taken together as a unified approach with the normative perspective occupying the core. In addition, we argue that this unified approach should be complemented by a participatory approach to add an interactive dimension to stakeholder conflict management and allow stakeholders to become active conflict-solvers. The paper concludes that this hybrid approach is essential to manage stakeholder conflicting expectations in academic program development and to project academic program development in HE as a shared social responsibility.

This paper investigates the conflict between institutional and translation theory norms. It analyzes an English translation of the publishing policy of a refereed journal in an Arab university and contrasts it with comparable English texts belonging to the same genre, i.e. contributor guidelines and style sheets from a number of refereed English journals. The analysis reveals the conflict in expectations and standards between translation institutions and translation theories and the need for translator training classrooms to open up to professional norms operating in the marketplace. A multi-layered approach to text analysis, motivated by the complex and dynamic nature of the translation process, is adopted here. The analysis – which examines translational choices, the text type, the client, the commission and the relevant institutional norms – gauges the impact of institutional norms on translators’ decisions and the relevance of such norms to translator training and pedagogy. The data drawn from...

In the previous chapter we have seen that the majority of studies of metonymy in classical rhetoric treated the trope as a process of substitution mainly involving words and hence reducing the power of the trope to linguistic substitution. In addition, metonymy has been treated as a process of substitution at the lexical level only. I have shown that this is a narrow view in both respects: as will be demonstrated in the course of this book, metonymy is not only a process of word substitution or a process limited only to the lexical level. This chapter investigates the nature and function of metonymy in modern figurative theory. The aim is to see whether and to what extent modern accounts have been able to capture these two important aspects of metonymy. The word ‘modern’ in the title of this chapter refers particularly to the work carried out in the area of metonymy from the early 1950s till the present day. It was in the early 1950s that attempts began to apply structural techniques to the study of literature and figurative language. It is generally accepted that the structural analysis of figurative language has benefited the field of figuration in terms of systematisation and paved the way for the creation of modern rhetoric. This is by no means to discredit the works of I.A. Richards (1936) and K. Burke (1945), which to some extent revolutionised the study of rhetoric and gave it fresh insight.

This chapter provides a theoretical and historical context for the book. Section 1.1 deals with the relationship between rhetoric and text linguistics. Section 1.2 considers the relationship between figurative theory and text linguistics. Section 1.3 deals with the history of metonymy in western rhetorical traditions. Section 1.4 moves on to discuss metonymy in the Arabic rhetorical tradition. The aim of these two latter sections is to show that the treatment of metonymy, as one of the main figures discussed in both rhetorical traditions, suffers from two major problems: (i) Theoretical reductionism, by reducing the nature of the trope to a mere substitution of words and neglecting its cognitive and pragmatic dimensions. (ii) Practical reductionism, by reducing the role of the trope to the level of lexical substitution and neglecting its potential power at the level of text.

The previous chapter proposed a semiotic approach to metonymy and developed a textual model for the trope. This chapter applies the model of textual metonymy to account for text cohesion. The following hypotheses underlie the chapter: (i) If metonymy is essentially referential (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; Stallard 1993; Gibbs 1994; Nunberg 1995; Stirling 1996; Warren 1999) then it should help us understand more about referencing in text. In fact, it is this referential basis, which is also the indexical1 basis of metonymy developed in Chapter 3 of this book, that enables metonymy to account for such a wide range of semantic relations as the ones to be discussed in this chapter. (ii) If metonymy is the manifestation of the syntagmatic and combinational dimensions of signification (see Jakobson 1971) then a theory of metonymy is in fact a theory that should help us understand how combinations in text are actually licensed. (iii) If metonymy is based on relations of causality and contiguity (and almost all researchers on metonymy agree on this), then metonymy is capable of providing a complete theory of text cohesion, given the fact that text connectedness is essentially based on these two basic relations.

The previous chapter discussed metonymy in modern figurative theory. The aim of this chapter is twofold. The first is to develop a semiotic approach to metonymy. In this connection I argue for a theory of motivatedness in linguistic signification based on the conceptualisation of metonymy as a mode of contiguous and causal signification. Metonymy is viewed essentially as a way of abstracting a relation between concepts, words and objects. This relation is fundamentally a relation of representation. As such metonymy resembles to a great extent the notion of a sign which is perceived as a three-dimensional entity covering the three modes of knowledge, i.e. of words, of concepts and of objects or things. This chapter aims to develop a semiotic approach to metonymy based on this rudimentary assumption. The second aim is to develop a textual model of metonymy based on this semiotic approach.

In the previous chapter I have shown that metonymic relations of FORM FOR FORM, FORM FOR THING, THING FOR FORM, CONCEPT FOR FORM and FORM FOR CONCEPT can actually be integrated into a textual model of formal and semantic connectedness in text. This I have termed ‘the cohesive power of metonymy’. In this chapter I argue that metonymic processes as text-organising principles are not limited to the set of formal or semantic bonds in text. Rather, these processes go beyond this to explain the pragmatic dimension of text generation, organisation and interpretation. This chapter builds on the relations of the formal component and goes beyond that to investigate the dynamic interaction between language, cognition and context in text creation and organisation. The metonymic representational relations to be discussed in this chapter are CONCEPT FOR CONCEPT, CONCEPT FOR THING, THING FOR CONCEPT AND THING FOR THING. This I term ‘the coherence power of metonymy’ in which there is continuity of ideas and interaction between concepts and contexts. This chapter is particularly an attempt to answer the question how, from a metonymic perspective, a text is perceived to form a unified whole and how it is perceived as meaningful. There are several approaches to the pragmatic aspect of meaning, and one could be tempted to investigate all of these, but I shall limit the scope of this chapter to discussing the theoretical framework of what has been generally referred to as ‘schema theory’. 1

This study builds on an observation that the verb fa?ala in Arabic, which means ‘do’, is essentially metonymic; it can refer to any transitive or intransitive verb in the language. This referential function is paradigmatic in nature and has been mentioned by classical Arab grammarians, hence their choice of this verb as the template or pattern on which all action verbs are formulated and modulated. The study proceeds from this basic observation to propose another type of referential function of the verb fa?ala, which is syntagmatic in nature: the cohesive function. Taking the Holy Qur’an as the corpus for this study, both functions of the verb are investigated in this study. A statistical analysis is carried out to identify all the occurrences of the verb fa?ala and its derivatives in the Holy Qur’an within their textual contexts, usually the verse. A textual analysis of each of these occurrences is, then, carried out to reveal the metonymic function of the verb fa?ala in all these instances. The study shows that within the general metonymic referential function of the verb fa?ala two basic sub-functions can be identified. The first is plain reference and the second is euphemistic reference. The findings of this study show that the plain reference function only accounts for about 37% of the total occurrences, while the euphemistic reference accounts for about 63% of the total Holy Qur’an corpus. These findings are significant because no previous study has addressed this textual aspect of the verb fa?ala in the Holy Qur’an, not even classical and contemporary exegetes. This study is also significant to linguistic and figurative studies of the Holy Qur’an, Holy Qur’an corpus studies and textual and pragmatic analysis of the Holy Qur’an.