Contrastive Lexicology and Comparable English-Arabic Corpora-Based Analysis of Vague and Mistranslated Arabic Equivalence: The Case of the Modern English-Arabic Dictionary of Al-Mawrid

Abstract

The main concern in this research is to reveal the existence of shortcomings in the representation of meaning in the equivalents provided in a given context of the bilingual English-Arabic dictionary of al-Mawrid (Ba<albaki 2005), and to disclose the contributions made in Contrastive Lexicology, Bilingual Lexicography, Translation Theory, Corpus Linguistics and Contrastive Linguistics, in an attempt to come up with a more suitable framework, based on bilingual lexicology and corpora-based approaches, for the analysis of equivalence in English-Arabic by means of computerized corpora, especially by what is known as comparable corpora. This research is divided into 6 Chapters. The introduction, Chapter 1, provides the statement of the research problem, the rationale, the objectives and the questions of the study. Chapter 2 discusses three issues: (i) the terms used to refer to the word; (ii) the semantic analysis and relations of the word; and (iii) the disciplines of bilingual lexicography, translation studies and contrastive linguistics, and their respective contributions to the central notion of equivalence in the bilingual dictionary. The discussion about the last issue will pave the way for using comparable corpora in the investigation of selected entries and their equivalents in the given context. It will also show how useful and effective such an approach is in criticising existing Arabic equivalents in al-Mawrid (2005). Chapter 3 is a review of the bilingual English-Arabic dictionary of al-Mawrid in terms of its purpose and the representation of meanings and entries. It also includes an overview of previous reviews. The aim is to provide and develop a new critical framework of al-Mawrid by a new multi-approach to equivalence in the English-Arabic dictionary, as given in Chapter 4: this is mainly based on comparable English-Arabic corpora, and the criteria for making two individual corpora comparable rather than parallel. Chapters 5 and 6 are dedicated to the analysis of equivalents which are found to be either vague (see Chapter 5) or a mistranslation (see Chapter 6) in a given context.