Lingua-Aesthetic Features of the Translation of Aslan’s Nile Sparrows: A Cognitive Stylistics Approach

Document Type : Original Article

Author

جامعة أکتوبر للعلوم الحديثة و الآداب

Abstract

Literary works present a full prism of potential dimensions that need to be taken into heed in the nexuses of translation. The present paper seeks to employ a lingua-stylistic, cognitive approach based on the one proposed by Boase-Beier (2014) in translating literary texts. It is applied to analyze Aslan’s Arabic novel Nile Sparrows (2005) with all stylistic nuances as a source text (ST) and its translated English version by El-Ghobashy (2008) as a target text (TT). Such approach provides an analysis for the lingua-stylistic, cognitive and aesthetic aspects of the literary STs the retaining of such features in their translated versions. Aslan’s ST exhibits an aesthetic, artistic shades displayed in the simple, prolific opus of lexical, rhetorical and syntactic canvas. El-Ghobashy's TT proves to convey a rather similar literary ingenuity, by employing a translational approach that faithfully follows the lingua-stylistics steps of Aslan's cognitive stylistic milieu. With very few exceptions, El-Ghobashy succeeds in retaining the ST lexical ingenuity, its cultural aspects, its idiomatic expressions the metaphors and figures of speech as well as modulating the syntactic stylistic structure of the ST to conform with the target language in the produced TT. All such translational choices help in recreating the ST aesthetic elegance, delineating its local and retaining its cognitive reality by keeping Aslan's lingua-stylistic features. This, to a great extent, allows the TT to have nearly the same ingenious impact on the target reader (TR) as the one implied by the ST on the source reader (SR).

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References

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