The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it attempts to demonstrate that Arabic utterances involving euphemisms, tautologies and ironies (henceforth Arabic implicatures) lend themselves readily to a Gricean interpretation and, second, it shows how Arabic implicatures in their immediate, social context of use exhibit pragmatic failures when rendered into English. The study examines and analyzes ten Arabic utterances involving implicatures in their original contexts of situation taken from Mahfouz’s (1947) Ziqāqal-Midaq which was translated by LeGassick (1966) into ‘Midaq Alley’, and Ṭayib Ṣaleḥ’s (1966) Mawsimu al-Hijra ila ashShamāl, translated by Davies (1969) into ‘the Season of Migration to the North’. The study argues that to avoid pragmatic failure when translating Arabic implicatures into English, emphasis should be placed on conveying the pragmatic import of these utterances by the employment of various translation strategies ranging from those capturing the form and/or function to those capturing the communicative sense independently.

Keywords: euphemism, irony, translation strategies, implicature, tautology, equivalence

DOI: 10.1075/babel.62.1.02she

العنوان

BABEL

الناشر

John Benjamin Publishing

بلد الناشر

هولندا

Indexing

Thomson Reuters

معامل التأثير

0,152

نوع المنشور

مطبوع فقط

المجلد

61

السنة

2016

الصفحات

21-38