Grammatical cohesion in translating English media discourse into Arabic

Kais A. Kadhim, Sohar University, Oman;       Abstract: Cohesive markers help to relate words and sentences together in the text. Also, they make the whole text united and meaningful resulting from their functions in linking the sentences. While translating from the SL to the TL, the translator may not translate the whole cohesive markers or translate them incorrectly which affect the communicative meaning of the SL.  In this study, the researcher will make use of Halliday and Hasan (1976) model of cohesion to identify cohesive markers used in Arabic and English texts, and only focusing on References as cohesive markers. The source English texts are taken from The New York Times and The Washington Post online articles, their translated Arabic versions are taken from the online Arabic newspaper, namely, Asharq Al-Awsat. Also, the study will adopt Nida’s translation techniques (1964) to identify the translation techniques used to translate English grammatical cohesive markers into Arabic text. The results showed that two techniques of Nida are appeared in analysis ‘Alteration’ and ‘Subtraction’, besides; one new technique is appeared in this study, namely ‘Sustaining’. By identifying the translation techniques used in translating the cohesive markers, the translators or the linguists will be aware of these techniques.

Keywords: Cohesion, References, Technique, Alteration, Subtraction