Translation of Alternative Self-help Books: Features of Provocative Register as a Case Study

Alternative self-help is a new subgenre in the making that opposes traditional self-help and adopts a provocative register. The present thesis investigates the whole corpus available and interviews all the parties involved in the translation process. The present thesis adopts a descriptive approach to investigate how the four features under investigation (swearing, religious, political and social behaviour references) are used and translated. The process is investigated to understand the roles of the parties involved and to enrich the textual analysis.

The findings indicate that swearwords were translated predominantly by paraphrasing into formal Arabic, which effected the transmission of meaning and tone. Additionally, the themes of the swearwords, whether religious, scatological, related to sexual organs, sexual activities, or family, and their grammatical placement significantly influenced the translation strategies employed. In fact, religious-themed swearwords were mostly omitted, whilst those related to sexual activities were paraphrased. Omissions were also noted in instances where the original swearwords appeared in grammatical structures that do not exist in Arabic. For taboo references to religion, politics, and social behaviours, the most common strategy was providing direct equivalents, and a variety of other strategies were applied in varies cases. The heavy usage of direct equivalent may have often led to alienating the reader.

Insights from the interviews reveal that the complexities of the subgenre were overlooked during the translation process. However, there was a conscious recognition of the Arabic language’s limitations in rendering informal registers. In conclusion, the distinctive features of the alternative self-help subgenre were not sufficiently rendered, leading to the target texts being assimilated into the broader self-help genre. Overall, the informality present in the source text was not rendered in the target text, hindering the communication of register and causing the subgenre to blend into the larger genre of self-help through the process of translation.