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A research proposal for the translation of Susan Okie's book "Fed Up", about childhood obesity.
Citation preview
A Translation of Susan Okie's Fed Up: Winning the War Against Childhood Obesity
By
XXXXX
XXXXX
University of XXXX
College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Department of Arabic Language and Literature
Supervisor
Prof. XXXX
12-24-2012
2
1 .Introduction
Translation is an important field that has enjoyed a prominent place throughout human
history. It is a complex concept, and as such has inspired different theorists and scholars to
come up with many different definitions to describe what it means. Some theorists such as
Catford see translation as substituting the text in the original language, referred to as the
source language or SL, by equivalent text in a different language, referred to as the target
language or TL (20). Other scholars such as Nida and Taber view translation as "…
reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source-language
message, first in terms of meanings and secondly in terms of style" (12) .
As the above demonstrates, though definitions abound, they all primarily center on
looking at translation as a process of, or at least an attempt at, establishing equivalence
between a source language and a target language. This process is complicated due to the
problems that arise in the process of establishing equivalence. These difficulties come at
different levels, such as the lexical, syntactic, textual, stylistic and cultural levels. As such,
translators should be aware of these difficulties as well as the methods and strategies used to
overcome them.
Part of translation's importance is due to the many functions it performed and continues to
perform. One of the most important roles that translation fulfilled and continues to facilitate
is the distribution of information and the spread of knowledge between different cultures. The
Golden Age of the Islamic world in the Abbasid era was possible in great part due to transfer
of knowledge through translation of the Classics of the time into Arabic, for instance
(Gregorian 27). Furthermore, as per Gregorian "… from the eleventh to the thirteenth
centuries, many Arabic translations of classic works were, in turn, translated into Turkish,
Persian, Hebrew, and Latin" (27). This function of translation is still essential in our modern
3
world of course, and one of the fields of study in which utilizing translation is especially
important is that of health. The field of human health has made strides in understanding
diseases of the body that afflict human societies and how to prevent and cure them. These
days, there is a worldwide focus on illnesses that are due to amendable lifestyle choices, and
one such illness is obesity. As per the World Health Organization, or WHO, "Worldwide
obesity has more than doubled since 1980" ("Obesity and Overweight"). This upswing in
obesity rates affects not only adults, but children as well. In fact, the WHO reports that "More
than 40 million children under the age of five were overweight in 2010", and these
overweight children are more likely to become obese, and as a result "… associated with a
higher chance of obesity, premature death and disability in adulthood" ("Obesity and
Overweight"). Thus a lot of research, studies and reports were and continue to be written
about the issue of childhood obesity: how to prevent, understand and treat it. These works
and studies done on the causes, effects and cures of childhood obesity should be translated
into Arabic so that everyone from health providers to parents to educators are aware of the
problems and solutions to this issue, because children of the Arab world are not exempt from
this global epidemic.
The book at hand titled Fed Up: Winning the War against Childhood Obesity by Susan
Okie is an easy read and an informative text that tackles the issue of childhood obesity. It
provides ample background information, gives instructive case studies and offers scientific
advice in overcoming this issue.
In this study, the book Fed Up: Winning the War against Childhood Obesity by Susan
Okie will be translated, and a commentary on the problems the translator encountered during
the translation process will be given. In addition, the strategies and methods used by the
translator to deal with these problems will be explained.
4
2. Purpose of the Study
This study aims to accomplish the following:
1. Provide a fluent translation of the selected book titled Fed Up: Winning the War
Against Childhood Obesity from English into Arabic.
2. Identify the problems encountered in the process of translation on the lexical,
syntactic and textual levels.
3. Propose appropriate strategies, methods and solutions to the problems encountered.
3. Significance of the Study
The significance of this study derives from the following points:
1. The rising rates of childhood obesity worldwide have prompted interest in
understanding and finding solutions to this epidemic. As such, this issue has been
subject of scientific and academic research and discussion.
2. The book to be translated is not merely a general overview of the issue, it
interviews children and families suffering from childhood obesity, and it talks to
researchers in this field. It also looks at the problem from a multifaceted point of
view starting from the period of pregnancy and after birth, going through the
family environment and reaching all the way to the school environment and then
the community as a whole. It also provides practical strategies and solutions to
implement in order to solve this problem at all these different levels.
3. There is a serious lack of authoritative books or studies written in the Arabic
language that deal with childhood obesity in an in-depth manner and provide
families, schools and communities with practical strategies and solutions for this
problem in comparison to literature published in English.
5
4. The translation of this book will fill a gap in the field of children's health in the
Arabic library seeing as there are hardly enough books on this particular subject
that provide more than a superficial overview or few generalized solutions to what
is a complex matter.
4. Limitations of the Study
There are some impediments to this study. One problem is that there are not nearly enough
academic articles or studies that deal with translating documents in the field of health,
especially pediatric health, into Arabic. Furthermore, since there is a deficiency of Arabic
books that tackle the subject of childhood obesity, there is no consensus on the medical terms
to be used in the process of translation. As such, the Arabic equivalents the translator will
choose to use after much deliberation and research might not be unanimously accepted or
even understood completely. Finally, even though the book provides practical advice that
could be used in any country, it still deals with childhood obesity in the United States
specifically. Furthermore, it adopts an informal tone and utilizes many personal experiences
from children, families and researchers dealing with child obesity. All of this might lead to
Arab readers overlooking the authoritative nature of the translated book and dismissing it as
not being academic enough.
5 .Review of Literature
As mentioned previously, translation has as many definitions as theorists and scholars care
to opine. However, almost all definitions circle back to talking about translation as a process
of establishing equivalence between the source language, SL, and the target language, TL.
But what is equivalence? It must be emphasized that the concept of equivalence is a
controversial one among scholars and theorists. In his essay "On Linguistic Aspects of
Translation", Roman Jakobson identifies three types of translation: intraligual which involves
6
rewording or paraphrasing in the same language, interligual that happens between different
languages and intersemiotic which deals with translation between signs (233). When it comes
to interligual translation which is the type translation studies deal with generally, Jakobson
advances the idea of "Equivalence in difference", a notion he reaches as a result of his view
that "… on the level of interlingual translation, there is ordinarily no full equivalence between
code-units" (233). So for Jakobson, a grammatical category available in the source language
but not the target language does not mean that translation cannot take place; it just means that
the translator faces a problem of equivalence and should find a way to solve it (235). Indeed,
"All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language"
according to Jakobson, and where gaps arise "… terminology may be qualified and amplified
by loan-words or loan-translations, neologisms or semantic shifts, and finally, by
circumlocutions" (234). Jakobson's view, in summary, is that equivalence exists between
linguistic items even in the absence of a direct literal correspondence between them .
For their part, Nida and Taber divide equivalence into two types: 1) dynamic equivalence,
and 2) formal correspondence- which was previously termed 'formal equivalence' but was
revised and renamed in the second edition of their book. Dynamic equivalence is defined as a
"… quality of a translation in which the message of the original texts has been so transported
into the receptor language that the RESPONSE of the RECEPTOR is essentially like that of
the original receptors" (Nida and Taber 200). Here the emphasis is on the meaning rather than
the form, and naturally it follows that when tension between both arises, the form is
sacrificed (Nida and Taber 13). Nida and Taber define formal correspondence on the other
hand as an approach wherein the source language's form is maintained as much as possible
during the process of translation, which might sometimes lead to problems in the
comprehensibility of the translated text (201). As all of the previous highlights the fact that
7
the dynamic and formal types of equivalence are on opposite sides of each other in terms of
their emphasis on meaning above form and vice versa .
Peter Newmark suggests eight methods of translation that differ in the degrees of their
fidelity to either the source language or the target language, and these methods are: word-for-
word translation, literal translation, faithful translation, semantic translation, adaptation, free
translation, idiomatic translation and communicative translation (45). Among these eight,
Newmark considers the semantic and communicative methods to be the only methods that
"… fulfill the two main aims of translation, which are first, accuracy, and second, economy"
(47). The semantic translation method is defined as being similar to faithful translation in the
sense that both attempt to "… reproduce the precise contextual meaning of the original
within the constraints of the TL grammatical structures", with the difference between the
faithful and semantic methods being that "… the first is uncom-promising and dogmatic,
while the second is more flexible, admits the creative exception to 100% fidelity and allows
for the translator's intuitive empathy with the original" (Newmark 46). Alternatively, the
communicative translation method is defined as "… [rendering] the exact contextual meaning
of the original in such a way that both content and language are readily acceptable and
comprehensible to the readership" (Newmark 47). It should be noted that Newmark's
semantic and communicative translation methods correspond to Nida's notions of dynamic
equivalence and formal correspondence. Nevertheless, Newmark disagrees with the notion of
what he calls the Equivalent Effect, which is basically Nida's Dynamic Equivalence, in that
he does not accept the idea of producing a translation with the aim of having the same effect
on the readers that the original had on its readers. Instead Newmark views this effect as
occurring as a result of the process of translation rather than a goal of it (48), so Newmark
was actually critical of Nida.
8
For her part, Mona Baker regards the term equivalence as not holding any special status,
and she states in the introduction to her book In Other Words that the only reason she uses the
word equivalence is "… for the sake of convenience" (5). For Baker, equivalence exists and
should be studied on several levels. In her book, she discusses these problems from the
lowest level which is at the word level, moving to above world level, passing by grammatical
level, proceeding to the textual level and then finally reaching the pragmatic level (Baker 5).
It comes as no surprise that defining what equivalence is leads to becoming conscious of
the problem of non-equivalence. In general, the farther away two languages are from each
other in terms of their genetic makeup and geographical/ cultural distance, the farther away
the linguistic and cultural aspects of those two languages are, and thus the more difficult the
task of establishing equivalence is. Baker tackles some problems of non-equivalence on all of
the five equivalence levels mentioned above and provides a number of solutions to them. At
word level, Baker discusses some non-equivalence problems such as culture-specific
concepts, semantically complex words and differences in expressive meaning among other
problems (21-22, 23) .
Strategies to deal with problems at word level as per Baker include translation using a
more general word, using a neutral or less expressive word and using cultural substitution and
these are only a few examples of strategies used by professional translators to overcome non-
equivalence problems at the word level (26, 28, 31) .
On non-equivalence problems above word level, Baker talks about the problems
encountered in translating collocations, idioms and fixed expressions (47). Some of the
problems with collocations arise due to assigning an incorrect meaning to them, or because of
the cultural-specificity of the collocation, plus other various issues (Baker 55, 59). Baker
9
briefly touches upon some solutions for these problems, like replacing collocations in the
source language with established target language collocations, for instance (56) .
As for idioms, Baker indicates that the biggest difficulty is due to the fact that to translate
an idiom correctly, the translator has to be able first to identify that the construct they face is
in fact an idiom (65). Various problems occur in the process of translating idioms due to
many issues, such as the absence of an equivalent idiom in the target language and the fact
that an idiom might be utilized simultaneously in an idiomatic and literal manner (Baker 68-
69). These are only two examples of the problems Baker talks about when it comes to idioms.
Baker provides many strategies for dealing with the problems that arise when attempting
translation of idioms. One strategy is finding and using an idiom of similar meaning and
similar form (Baker 72). When such an idiom is unavailable, the strategy moves to using an
idiom of similar meaning and dissimilar form (Baker 74). These strategies descended from
the strongest to the weakest, which is omission (Baker 77).
Baker also talks about the problems of non-equivalence on the grammatical level. Because
grammar systems are naturally different (Baker 85), when dealing with two different
languages translators are bound to face difficulties. So, grammatical categories such as
number, gender, person, voice and tense and aspect might exist in the source language but not
the target language which creates difficulties within the process of translation (Baker 87-
110) .
According to Baker, problems at the textual level have to do with the thematic/
information structures and cohesion and how both are achieved in the source language text
and the target language text (119-225). Non-equivalence problems on the pragmatic level are
concerned by the implicit communicative meaning of a text (Baker 217-259).
10
6 .Research Methodology
The main aim of this study is to produce as good a translation as possible of the English
language book Fed Up, and to that end the translator will be using a combination of the
communicative and semantic translation methods, which have been already explained. These
methods are adopted because the communicative method is concerned with the target
language rather than the source language and as such will help the text be more reader
friendly, while the semantic method will help maintain the accuracy of the source text .
6.1 .Research Instruments
The translator will rely on dictionaries in the process of translation. In addition, she will
utilize online dictionaries and glossaries for any specialized terms, collocations and idioms
that she will face. Internet searches and reading up articles and studies will be done when
necessary .
6.2 .Research Procedures
A time frame for the translation is set. The text will be read for the first time in order to
have a general overview of it. Next the translation process starts along with the commentary.
The translation problems and issues that are bound to surface throughout the process will be
identified and the level on which they occur (lexical, grammatical, textual, etc.) will be
described. Then the items that have come up in each level will be arranged into separate
groups- with each level as a heading- and the individual problems will be explained along
with the strategies used to deal with them. After that, the translation will be read one last time
in order to ensure it is free of mistakes and reads like a fluent and natural text.
7 .Data Analysis
11
In the process of translating the book, many problems were encountered. These problems
were on the lexical, grammatical and textual levels. Brief explanations of each identified
problem, along with illustrative examples of them and how they were solved are described
below:
1 .Lexical Problems
Naturally, different languages use different words to express concepts, notions and ideas.
Sometimes the same concept will be expressed by different words and other times the same
words will contain different connotative meanings. Some languages assign a word to a
specific idea that does not exist in another language. This clash is the reason lexical problems
occur .
As mentioned previously, lexical problems can be found on both the word and above word
levels. Examples for both are given below :
1.1 .Non-equivalence at Word Level
Some of the non-equivalence problems at word level encountered in the translation
process:
1.1.1 .Synonymy
In linguistics, a synonym is "… a word that means the same or nearly the same as another
word" according to The Free Dictionary .
Example on page 2:
The words pasta, macaroni, noodles and spaghetti can be all considered synonymous.
They are used when describing a school activity one of the overweight children interviewed
in the book is engaging in with her best friend. If the differences between these words were to
12
be fleshed out, then we'd either end up with four unnecessary transliterations, or too many
additional words to explain the distinctions between them, which would lead to an awkward
and unnatural Arabic text. That's why the translator decided to forego emphasizing these
small dissimilarities and go with translating all of these words as .
1.1.2 .Use of interjections
According the Ameka, interjections “… form a significant subset of those seemingly
irrational devices that constitute the essence of communication” (qtd in Thawabteh 5). Carter
and McCarthy have noted that interjections affect discourse because implicit within them are
hidden meanings which illuminate the responses and reactions of the speaker to the discourse
(qtd in Thawabteh 6). So, interjections play an important role in facilitating communication .
Example on page 2:
In the quotation "Mmm, tasty" the interjection Mmm is used to signify satisfaction and
pleasure. Since an equivalent Arabic interjection is available, the translator simply translated
this interjection literally into , which signals the same emotions in Arabic when used in
this context .
1.1.3 .Acronyms:
According to online dictionary Merriam-Webster, acronyms are defined as "… a word (as
NATO, radar, or laser) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts
or major parts of a compound term; also : an abbreviation (as FBI) formed from initial
letters" (author's emphasis) .
Example from title page :
ممم
المعكرونة
13
The author's name is followed by the acronym M.D., which stands for Medical Doctor, or
in other words holding a degree allowing the author to work as a doctor. The term used in
Arabic to describe this degree is . Since there is no Arabic acronym to describe
this degree, unlike English, and because creating an acronym from the initial letters of
will produce which is nonsensical in this context as it is not recognized
nor accepted unanimously, the translator decided to translate the full meaning of the term
rather than use an acronym .
1.2 .Non-Equivalence above Word Level
A few of the non-equivalence problems above world level that were encountered are as
follows :
1.2.1 .Collocations
According to Oxford Dictionaries online, collocations are "… the habitual juxtaposition of
a particular word with another word or words with a frequency greater than chance". In other
terms, some words co-occur together frequently, and these are called collocations.
Example on page 1:
The collocation tend goal has an equivalent in Arabic that the translator searched for and
found, which is , so since an equivalent collocation exists, it was used.
1.2.2 .Idioms
Loos, et al, briefly explain that an idiom is "… a multiword construction that is a
semantic unit whose meaning cannot be deduced from the meanings of its
constituents, and has a non-productive syntactic structure" ("What is an idiom") .
Example on page 2:
الطب في دكتوراه
الطب في .دكتوراه ط. د
حراسة
المرمى
14
The traffic is described as being "bumper to bumper". This is an idiom that means
to convey that the traffic is moving very slowly. The translator could not find an
Arabic idiom equivalent in form and meaning nor could she find one that was
equivalent in meaning but not in form that was appropriate and didn't sound strange in
this context, and so she decided to translate the meaning of the idiom and discard the
form. As such, the translation of this idiom is.
1.2.3 .Compounds
In the simplest terms, and as per The Free Dictionary, a compound is "a word composed
of two or more words". Wikipedia tells us that compounds specifically speaking are created
through bringing together two or more words that are already established, which leads to the
creation of a new word with a new meaning, and so compounding is basically one of the
ways languages compose and come up with new words ("Compound (linguistics)"). There
are three types of compounds when it comes to form: "… the closed form, in which the words
are melded together… the hyphenated form… and the open form" (Capital Community
College Foundation). Some of examples the translator came across :
1.2.3.1 .Closed Form Compounds
Example on page 1:
The closed form compound classmates is translated as . It could have
been left as merely and it would have been probably understood from context, but for
the sake of disambiguating the meaning completely the translator chose to add.
1.2.3.2 .Hyphenated Compounds
Example on page 2 :
بطيئة
� جدا
في زمالئها
المدرسة زمالئها
في
المدرسة
15
The hyphenated compound single-story is translated as , which fulfills the
meaning of the compound .
1.2.3.3 .Open Form Compounds
Example on page 2 :
The word ice cream is an open form compound and it is translated as . The first
thought the translator had was to transliterate the word, since some other candy names that
had no equivalents in Arabic were transliterated. However, since not all of those names had
been transliterated and this particular open form compound already has an equivalent in
Arabic, the translator decided to use the equivalent available .
1.2.4 .Cultural-specific terms
Cultural specific terms are those terms which are related to the culture they were born in.
Concepts that only occur in specific cultures will be lexicalized to fit in that culture, and as
such are difficult and sometimes impossible to translate into another culture. Examples of
cultural specific terms are:
Example on page 2:
The term cancan kicks talks about the style of kicks performed in a music hall
French dance. Because in the context it occurs in, wherein Megan and her friends are
competing to see who can perform the highest cancan kick, it's not important that the
kind of kick they do is associated with the cancan dance. Having to explain what the
cancan dance is would have taken up space and still be considered useless in this
context. That is why the translator opted to omit the mentioning of 'cancan' and used
the general term of instead .
1.2.5 .Technical Terms
طابق ذات
واحد
بوظة
ركلة
16
According to Wikipedia, technical terms are "the specialized vocabulary of any field, not
just technical fields" while Jargon "… is similar, but more informal in definition and in use"
("Technical terminology") .
Example from subtitle:
Obesity is the topic of this book and is used in the subtitle and repeated many times
throughout the text. The translator was initially considering three translations, which are :
الوزن .1 فرط
السمنة .2 فرط
البدانة .3 فرط
After some research, and as per as the World Health Organization Arabic webpage ,
I discovered that the actual term is simply In addition ,
Actually means 'overweight' and not obesity. The confusion remains over whether the
term is actually the general consensus for obesity, as research on the internet
showed me that it is used to describe an obese and an overweight person
interchangeable. The translator committed to this term because the WHO uses it .
1.2.6 .Proper Nouns
Proper nouns basically mean those names that are specific to a person, a place or a
thing (Loos, et al. "What is a proper noun")
1.2.6.1 .Names of People
Examples on pages 1, 2 and 3:
The names of people mentioned in the book such as Meagan, Julia and others are all
transliterated. So they become Since the whole book is culturally tied to the
. (" الوزن(" وفرط السمنة
السمنة
الوزن فرط
السمنة
ميجان andجوليا.
17
United States, it makes sense to transliterate the names rather than attempt a strategy of
domestication .
2 .Grammatical Problems
Grammatical problems in translation relate to those difficulties that occur in the
process of rendering a text from one language to another because of the differences in
the grammatical systems of both languages. Some of the grammatical problems faced
in the process of translating this book are as follows:
2.1 .Word Order
Through a general examination of English and Arabic, one would find that both
retain different word orders when it comes to verbs, subjects and objects in the
context of sentence structures as well as the word order of modifiers and adverbials
(Wikipedia "Word order") .
Example on page 2:
Hot chocolate is translated into Arabic by rearranging the word order, and so it
becomes , and because the adjective follows the noun in Arabic,
changing the word order of the English- where the adjective precedes the noun- was
necessary to achieve a correct Arabic translation .
2.2 .Passive and Active Voice
In English, a passive sentence might be agentless or agentive, and there are many
features and traits specific to English passive and active sentence structures (Baker
102-109). Arabic's rules and traits for passive and active sentence structures differ,
and Arabic as a rule prefers active structures to passive ones (Khafaji 19).
Example on page 2:
الساخنة الشوكوالتة
18
" Meagan and her best friend, Julia, are assigned a special activity" is a passive
sentence. The agent is without doubt their teacher. Because Arabic prefers an active
structure and the agent is known from the context, the appropriate translation is
. خاص بنشاط القيام جوليا المفضلة وصديقتها ميجان على المعلمة تعين
So the passive is turned into active voice .
2.3 .Phrasal verbs
A phrasal verb consists of a "… verb and one or more following particles and
acting as a complete syntactic and semantic unit" (The Free Dictionary) .
Example in the title:
The tile of this book is Fed Up, which is a phrasal verb. It is also a pun. The
translator looked for an equivalent Arabic phrasal verb and found , which
works as well as a pun as it was intended to be in the original text .
2.4 .Agreement Issus
Agreement is defined as "The correspondence of a verb with its subject in person
and number, and of a pronoun with its antecedent in person, number, and gender"
(Nordquist "Agreement") .
2.4.1 .Gender
Example on page 1:
The word dietitian in the quote "Meagan has seen a dietitian, who taught her about
portion sizes and how to rate her hunger on a scale of 1 to 10" does not tell us the
gender of the dietitian since in general words in English lack a feminine or masculine
quality. Nor is any context beyond that sentence available that might clue the
translator on the gender of the dietitian. In the absence of any information, the
translator decided to write the dietitian as female due to the fact that most dietitians do
tend to be women. So the translation is:
الكيل طفح
19
جوعها" تقدر وكيف الطعام وجبات أحجام عن علمتها تغذية مستشارة ميجان زارت لقد
" عشرة إلى واحد مقياس على
The whole sentence is turned into active and the verb made to agree with the feminine
noun as is appropriate for Arabic (Al-Muhtaseb and Mellish 5) .
2.4.2 .Number
Example on page 1:
In Arabic, "Some agreements in number (and other features) should be imposed in
between verbs and names" (Al-Muhtaseb and Mellish 10), and while English does not
have a grammatical category of dual, Arabic does. So when 2 miles is translated it
becomes . So the English lexical item '2' becomes a grammatical
category in Arabic that is inflected as per it's placement in the sentence.
3 .Textual Problems
Textual problems are those problems that arise on the level of the text during the
translation task. These relate to the comprehensibility, coherence and cohesion of the
text. Examples on this aspect are as follows :
3.1 .Connectors and Punctuation
Connecters are one of the most used cohesive devices that allow the text to flow
smoothly and cohesively. Punctuation marks, too, help greatly in creating this
cohesiveness.
Example on page 1:
Meagan gets up early, before her father and brother are awake, and fries up a
batch of soy bacon. Ten and a half years old, she is a committed vegetarian
who likes the taste of meat, and she is ravenous. She washes the bacon down
with a glass of water, then gets ready for school. She’s in the fifth grade at a
ميلين بعد على تقع
20
public school about 2 miles from her home in Palos Verdes, a seaside Los
Angeles suburb .
The Arabic translation on the other hand is:
من مصنوع المقدد للحم � نباتيا � بديال لتقلي وأخاها والدها قبل � باكرا ميجان تستيقظ
الغذائي بالنظام ملتزمة العمر من والنصف العاشرة في طفلة فهي الصويا،
ميجان وتتبع بنهم، أعدته الذي الطعام تلتهم فتراها اللحم طعم وتحب النباتي
الصف في طالبة هي حيث للمدرسة، للذهاب تستعد ثم ماء بكوب وجبتها
ضاحية في الواقع منزلها من ميلين بعد على تقع حكومية مدرسة في الخامس
. فيرديس بالوس اسمها أنجيلوس لوس في ساحلية
English prefers full short sentences that give you an idea before moving to the next in a
cohesive manner, while Arabic is attracted to long continuous sentences generously sprinkled
with connectors that bind them together in one smooth flow. In the English text, there are
four complete sentences, while the Arabic translation consists of only one long sentence. The
Arabic translation contains about seven or eight repetitions of a few connectors such as
. The usage of these connectives, along with the usage of commas throughout the translated
text and a period at the end of it, both assist in making the Arabic translation run smoothly
and achieve a cohesive quality. This helps greatly in making the translation an appropriate
and correct one.
8 .Conclusion
The purpose of this study is to produce an appropriate translation of the book Fed
Up: Winning the War Against Childhood Obesity by Susan Okie. In order to
accomplish that, the problems of non-equivalence at the lexical, grammatical and
textual levels will be explored. Solutions for the difficulties identified will be then
proposed and implemented. The result is what is hopefully considered a reader
and ف و، ،
21
friendly and informative text that could be a source of enrichment to the Arabic
library .
9 .Recommendations
1 .Translator trainees should recognize that it's not enough to rely on dictionaries
alone as they do not give the full meanings of terms and words in different
contexts .
2 .Translator trainees should make use of the internet when terms and concepts
prove difficult to decipher even after consulting dictionaries, or if they are facing
concepts that are too cultural specific and background information about them is
needed. Online searches also assist in determining how widespread the use of a
term is, and in this way they help the translator decide on which term to use when
several options are available .
22
Works Cited
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Okie, Susan. Fed Up: Winning the War Against Childhood Obesity. Washington :
Jospeh Henry, 2005. Print .
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الوزن" 20 Dec. 2012.
24
Appendix 1
The Translated Text:
! الكيل طفح
. األطفال لدى السمنة ضد الحرب في ننتصر كيف
الطب في دكتوراه أوكي، سوزان
األسمن الجيل
فهي الصويا، من مصنوع المقدد للحم � نباتيا � بديال لتقلي وأخاها والدها قبل � باكرا ميجان تستيقظفتراها اللحم طعم وتحب النباتي الغذائي بالنظام ملتزمة العمر من والنصف العاشرة في طفلة
حيث للمدرسة، للذهاب تستعد ثم ماء بكوب وجبتها ميجان وتتبع بنهم، أعدته الذي الطعام تلتهمفي الواقع منزلها من ميلين بعد على تقع حكومية مدرسة في الخامس الصف في طالبة هي
. فيرديس بالوس اسمها أنجيلوس لوس في ساحلية ضاحية
و ذكية طفلة وهي جديدة، طبية نظارات وترتدي حصان ذيل شكل على تربطه بني شعر لميجانالرقص تحب منبسطة اجتماعية شخصية امتالكها إلى إضافة اآلخرين، تضحك كيف تعرف
. فيها تشترك التي القدم كرة مباريات في المرمى وحراسة والغناء
محط يجعلها بدأ الذي األمر وسطها، حول بخاصة األخيرة اآلونة في زاد ميجان وزن أن إالوقد كطبيبن يعمالن اللذان والديها قلق ويثير األحيان، بعض في المدرسة في زمالئها سخريةوغيرها الدم ضغط زيادة و القلب كأمراض األعراض من � كثيرا المهنية حياتهما فترة طوال عالجا
. البالغين لدى السمنة فرط يسببها التي المضاعفات من
على جوعها تقدر وكيف الطعام وجبات أحجام عن علمتها تغذية مستشارة ميجان زارت ولقدأن وتود عشرة، إلى واحد مقياس
)1الصفحة(
كرة لعب عند أسرع بشكل الحركة تستطيع ولكي زمالئها سخرية لتتوقف وزنها من تنقص. تأكله الذي الطعام وعلى حياتها على مسيطرة تكون أن في رغبتها ذلك من األهم أن إال القدم،
وتحب السكني، حيها من القريبة والبوظة الدوناتز متاجر كافة تسمية ويمكنها الحلوى تحب فهيويقوم شوكوالتة رقاقات أو المفضلة حلوياتكم تختاروا أن يمكن حيث بوظة متجر باألخص
. " ميجان " حسب البوظة في بهرسها المحل في العاملون
على للدراجات مخصص ممر وجود من الرغم وعلى اليوم، هذا صباح في � جدا بطيئة السير حركةأن عليها والديها يلح حيث المدرسة، إلى دراجتها ميجان تركب أن النادر من أنه إال الطريق جانب
يصعب أنه إال السير، حركة بشأن قلقهما رغم الرياضية التمارين من i قسطا تنال حتى ذلك تفعلالبوق حمل تستطيع ال أنها كما االنحدار، شديدة الطريق أجزاء في بالدراجة التحكم ميجان على
من فإنه بالنهاية المدرسية، الموسيقية الفرقة مع فيها تتدرب التي األيام في تحتاجه الذي
25
� ركوبا بالذهاب إقناعها عن � عوضا بالسيارة المدرسة إلى اصطحابها ميجان والدي على األسهل. دراجتها على
ومماشي، ساحات تربطها واحد طابق ذات مباني مجموعة من اإلبتدائية ميجان مدرسة تتكون . للطلبة يسمح أخرى ورياضات القدم كرة للعب كبيرة معشبة وساحة مالعب خلفها ويقع
على لتتأرجح دورها ميجان وتنتظر األول، الجرس يدق أن بعد الملعب على دقائق بضع المكوثلتتارجح الوقت يتسع دقائق عشرة مرور وبعد كبيرة، سيارة عجلة إطار من مصنوعة أرجوحة
إلى الذهاب عليها ويتوجب الثاني الجرس يدق أن قبل فقط واحدة مرة األرجوحة على ميجانالفصل.
خاص بنشاط القيام جوليا المفضلة وصديقتها ميجان على المعلمة تعين اليوم هذا صباح وفيوصمغ، مجففة معكرونة باستخدام نموذج بناء ثم اإلنترنت على الجسور تصميم عن البحث وهووذلك شديدة بعناية الصمغ باستخدام البعض ببعضها المجففة المعكرونة نهايات بلصق فقامتا
بوضع يرضيان النهاية في جعلهما مما ينهار، ظل صنعتاه ما أن إال قنطرة، صنع أمل على. عادي جسر لصنع جنب إلى � جنبا المعكرونة
وحين المجففة، المعكرونة من أجزاء فتأكالن بالجوع، بالشعور الطفلتين وتبدأ ونصف ساعة تمروفي – الكالم وكثيرة نحيفة طفلة وهي جوليا وتقوم الساحة، إلى تخرجان الفرصة وقت يحين
- حلوى فيه � بالستيكيا � كيسا كذلك وتفتح ساخن شوكوال شراب فيه ترموس غطاء بفتح دائبة حركة" الساخنة؟ " الشوكوال بعض أتريدين ميجان، وتسأل المارشميلو
" " غمس " نستطيع ربما وتضيف ألذه، ما ممم، بالشراب تتلذ وهي وتقول ميجان فتقبل". فيها المجففة المعكرونة
الفتيات فتبدأ المارشميلوز، عليهن جوليا تمرر و األخريات صديقاتهما الطفلتين إلى ينضم ثموبعدها ركلة، أعلى تنفيذ يمكنها من لتحديد يتنافسن ثم أفواههن، في والتقاطها � عاليا بقذفها
" " . توقعت رجلي، بشق قمت إذا الجينز بنطالي سيتمزق الجمبازية رجلين شق حركة أوسعميجان.
)2الصفحة(
26
Appendix 2
The Original Text:
Fed Up!
Winning the War Against Childhood Obesity
Susan Okie, M.D.
The Fattest Generation
Meagan gets up early, before her father and brother are awake, and fries up a batch of soy bacon .
Ten and a half years old, she is a committed vegetarian who likes the taste of meat, and she is ravenous.
She washes the bacon down with a glass of water, then gets ready for school .
She’s in the fifth grade at a public school about 2 miles from her home in Palos Verdes, a seaside Los Angeles suburb.
Meagan has shiny brown hair in a ponytail and new glasses. Smart and funny, she’s an extrovert who loves to sing and dance and to tend goal in soccer games.
Recently, though, she has gained a lot of weight, especially around her middle—a fact that has started to provoke occasional teasing by classmates and to worry her parents, both of
27
them doctors who have been treating heart disease, high blood pressure, and other complications of obesity in adults for their entire careers.
Meagan has seen a dietitian, who taught her about portion sizes and how to rate her hunger on a scale of 1 to 10. She would like to
)Page 1(
be leaner, to put a stop to the teasing, and to be able to move faster in soccer, but she also wants to be in charge of her own life and of what she eats.
She loves sweets and can name all the doughnut and ice cream stores near her neighborhood. She’s especially partial to one ice cream parlor where you can choose your favorite candy bar
or chocolate chips and they “mush it in”.
This morning traffic is bumper to bumper on the way to school. Although there’s a bike lane beside the road, Meagan rarely rides to school. Despite their concerns about the traffic, her parents have been urging her to do so for the sake of the exercise, but she has difficulty pedaling the steepest part of the route, and she can’t transport her cornet by bicycle on band practice days. Driving her to school is usually easier for her mother and father than overcoming her resistance .
The elementary school is a cluster of single-story buildings connected by courtyards and walkways, backed by playgrounds and a large grassy field for soccer and other games. After the first bell rings, students are allowed a few minutes on the playground. Meagan waits for a turn to spin on a big tire swing. Ten minutes and one spin later, the second bell sends her off to homeroom .
This morning Meagan and her best friend, Julia, are assigned a special activity: they are to research bridge design on the Internet and build an example using dried pasta and glue. Hoping to make an arch, they painstakingly glue tubes of macaroni end to end, but their constructions keep falling apart. Eventually they settle for laying out noodles side by side to make a beam bridge .
Ninety minutes go by, and the girls get hungry. They munch on pieces of dried spaghetti. At recess the two go outside to the courtyard. Julia, chatty, slender, and constantly in motion, unscrews a thermos of steaming hot chocolate and opens a plastic bag of marshmallows. “Meagan, you want hot chocolate?” “Mmm, tasty,” says Meagan, slurping a cupful. “Maybe
we can dip the noodles ”.
Friends join them and Julia passes around the marshmallows. The girls throw them in the air and catch them in their mouths. They compete to see who can do the highest cancan kicks, then the widest split. “I’m going to break my jeans if I do a split,” Meagan predicts .
)Page 2(
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