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

Title

BABEL

Publisher

John Benjamin Publishing

Publisher Country

Netherlands

Indexing

Thomson Reuters

Impact Factor

0.152

Publication Type

Prtinted only

Volume

61

Year

2016

Pages

21-38