Analyzing Postgraduate Student Commentaries on Literary English/Arabic Translation

Résumé

Writing a translation commentary is one of the tools for teaching and learning about translation. It can serve as an aid for evaluation, an activity for raising the consciousness of the students, or a basis for planning further instruction. Writing a translation commentary in English on an Arabic translation of an English literary text is the most challenging for Libyan postgraduate students, especially as they have learnt English as a foreign language. Having said that, making students to write translation commentaries in the classroom, a common practice proved to be a fruitful one, in this case. This paper is an exercise on analysing 15 translation commentaries of English to Arabic translation of one text. The source text for translation is a literary commentary on a poem titled: The Farmer’s Bride by the English poet: Charlotte Mew, first published in 1916. The paper will also describe the Translation Commentary as a tool to be used by postgraduate students for research on translation and understanding the process of translating English literary texts into Arabic. The paper concludes that writing a translation commentary is an interactive process, which involves the understanding not only the content and the connotations of the ST but also the other aspects including linguistic, phonetic and figurative characteristics that make it a literary creation.