Genre Identity And Comprehensibility Assessment In The Arabic Versions Of Self-help Manuals
Keywords:
Comprehensibility Assessment, Genre integrity, PopularizationAbstract
This empirical research assesses quality in the intralingual translation of self-help-manual in the Arab world. It questions transfer competence in the versions produced by Arab therapists and life coaches who have migrated from the realm of scientific discourse to knowledge popularization. This research adopts the perspective that shows how macro and micro analyses of the subjects‟ textual choices contribute to investigating the genre boundaries in the prefaces of ten manuals produced in different Arabic countries. It also applies a model of text comprehensibility assessment to examine knowledge transfer in the manuals. Qualitative and quantitative research methodologies have been adopted to study the causal relationships and the distribution of rhetorical moves, meta-discourse markers and comprehensibility dimensions in the source text and in ten Arabic versions. Rhetorical analysis of the prefaces has revealed the insertion of rhetorical moves from promotional genres (i.e. product advertising; self-representation in business settings) which has affected the genre integrity and aroused the promotional effort in the prefaces. Comprehensibility assessment has proved that the subjects have compensated for their lack of linguistic competence by their bicultural competence and by predominant use of some comprehensibility dimensions („simplicity‟, „motivation‟ and „perceptibility‟), which have increased the level of comprehensibility in most of the versions.
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