Translating the Discourse of Alienation: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four and Haqqi's Saint's Lamp as Case Studies

Abstract

"A basic property of language is that it enables its users to formulate a mental picture of reality and to make sense of and express what goes around and inside them" (Hatim, 1997, p. 179). This research is aimed at investigating those linguistic functions that are particularly productive in creating a discourse of 'alienation'. A more specific aim is to assess the extent to which these discursive forms and functions have been preserved in translation into and out of Arabic, and what kind of translation strategies have been used to achieve this. To pursue these research goals, the textual, interpersonal and ideational metafunctions are taken as a starting point, with a particular focus on the system of transitivity, an aspect of the ideational domain that is primarily concerned with reflecting 'experiential meanings'. The investigation of the transitivity system and its discursive implications is supplemented by investigating other syntactic devices such as the passive voice, depersonalization, negation and nominalization. The textual data analyzed include passages from the controversially futuristic novel Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell and from the modern Arabic novella The Saint's Lamp by the Egyptian writer Yahya Haqqi. Both novels are saturated with themes of alienation, estranged mind style and undermined agency in an environment where inanimate objects seem to be the actual initiators of actions as if they have claimed the human characteristic of will and power to themselves. Through a careful assessment of source and target texts, this research will show how efficient the various 'syntactic devices' have been in creating a discourse of alienation, and how effective the various translation strategies adopted have been in preserving the ultimate effect. The overall objective is to identify a number of methods that would enhance the performance of translators dealing with sensitive texts that are discursively marked.