A Stylistic Analysis of News English-Arabic Translation

Leech and Short (1981, p.74) argues that every analysis of style is an attempt to find the artistic principles behind an author’s choice of language. Hence, this article focuses on the stylistic that exist in English-Arabic translation texts of the British Broadcasting Corporation‘s (BBC) political news. It attempts to find the nature of the stylistic changes as proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet (1995) and also to show how the differences in the order of sentence constituents and the points of grammars of the Source Texts (ST) and Target Texts (TT) contribute to the stylistic and the semantic changes. This paper deals with the sequences of the sentence constituents, some elements of grammar such as tenses, prepositions and adverbs, and the semantic changes that have consequently taken place in the Arabic translation. The paper makes use of the stylistic ideas of Ghazala (1995) as well as X’ Theory by Culicover (1997) to capture the syntactic changes. The analysis of the data shows the following: (a) The semantic changes are attributable to the differences on points of grammar (tenses, prepositions and adverbs) the differences in the weltanschauung (world-view) of the speakers of the ST and the TT arising from different cultural emphasis and differences in some socio-linguistics elements; and (b) The stylistic changes are essentially arising from differing language structures.