Introduction
The notion of language, despite decades of meticulous research and a variety of opportunities for empirical observation, remains one of the most challenging aspects in terms of its definition. The extensive paradigm of existing language definitions is, for the most part, quite contradictory, especially when it comes to the aspect covered by the following term (Fasold & Connor-Linton, 2013). Thus, in order to agree upon a certain definition of a language, it should be abstract enough not to limit one’s research field. One of such appropriate interpretations of the term is the definition coined by Finegan and Besnier (1989):
Language is a finite system of elements and principles that make it possible for speakers to construct sentences to do particular communicative jobs. (p. 132)
Given that language is perceived as a system of elements aimed at fulfilling the need for communication and information exchange, these elements are to be systemized according to some basic principles. Hence, the study of linguistics is primarily focused on the academic aims of categorizing language into specific groups and phenomena through active intervention into the human language. Such a meticulous investigation is performed within a variety of subdivisions, branches, and correlated disciplines (Litosseliti, 2018). Currently, the scope of linguistic research is generally divided into two major aspects: grammatical and communicative competence. While in a utopian linguistic environment, both of the paradigms are treated with equal respect to their contribution to language development, reality claims that researchers aim to prove the superiority of one of these variances (Strey & Monawar, 2017). As a result, the diachronic development of linguistics was marked by two major approaches to language investigation – structuralism and functionalism.
The supporters of the former branch, coined by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1916, provide a clear distinction between the notions of language as a semiotic system (langue) and speech acts (parole), paying specific attention to the systematic hierarchy of the language (Key & Noble, 2017). Functionalists, on the other hand, pay more attention to the acts of communication, which form the basis of a language and fulfill its major aims. (Thomas, 2019). Despite both of the approaches lacking exhaustive argumentation, the focus of this translation-oriented research is placed upon the functionalist paradigm. One of the major benefits of such an approach is the ability to perceive language as a continuously developing segment, which modifies along with the communicative shifts within society.
Definition of Systemic Functional Linguistics
When putting aside the purely academic approach to the issue of linguistics, most active language users who employ it on a daily basis rarely ponder the structural peculiarities of their communication, including grammatical nuances. In fact, their only focus is dedicated to the process of conveying a meaningful message to other speech actors in order to perform a successful information exchange (Endarto, 2017). Hence, bearing this aspect in mind, functionalist researchers led by Halliday coined the notion of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), which was primarily focused on the language function, claiming the structure to be irrelevant when obtaining no communicative purpose (Eggins, 2004). Thus, according to the following theoretical framework, every single aspect of a language system, even when bearing no semantic load outside of the structure, should be primarily regarded through the prism of communicative act performance.
Halliday & Matthiessen (2004) define SFL as an umbrella term, which encompasses the analyses of language expression, message content, and context of a communicative situation. Moreover, the major peculiarity of a given analysis concerns an original approach in terms of its stages, as it goes “upside-down,” beginning with the assessment of context. This choice could most likely be justified by the significance of the communication act, which is difficult to evaluate without extensive knowledge of the communicative situation following the utterance.
SFL Analysis Procedure
The very procedure of the SFL approach on a specific language use example consists of a number of steps aimed at assessing different communicative levels, also known as strata. Thus, the aforementioned fields of the analysis are then divided into more specific levels of language and context investigation:
- Expression analysis deals with phonetics and phonology;
- The content analysis deals with the lexicogrammar investigation of lexemes and their role in the speech act and their semantic peculiarities;
- Context analysis is correlated with the assessment of the communicative environment of an utterance (Halliday & Matthienssen, 2004).
The following stratification of the utterances used in a language is then analyzed in accordance with the major metafunctions of functional linguistics: ideational, interpersonal, and textual aspects. Each of these variables is responsible for the ways in which the given speech act constructs human experience, manages interpersonal relationships, and states a logically structured and coherent semantic message (Becker, 2020). When applying the stratification pattern to a particular instance, some of the major linguistic choices of the actor are justified, whether they concern physical, mental, or verbal process (Fernandez, 2018). The processes could be easily identified within a language with fixed word order. The other languages, which do not necessarily imply verb utilization, require some additional analysis in terms of function identification. Thus, SFL contributes to the construction of a pragmatic paradigm within a communicative unit, making it easier for the message intermediator to encode the utterance into another semiotic system (i.e., target language) without losing functional equivalence. This peculiarity especially concerns rendering texts into a target language with significantly different lexico-grammatical characteristics, e.g., English – Arabic translation paradigm.
English – Arabic Translation Peculiarities
According to the basic principles of SFL, the contextual environment of a given utterance displays some of the major information in terms of the identification of the message’s nuclear content. Thus, bearing in mind this fact, one might outline that cultural differences in terms of decoding and encoding semantic meaning into the utterance play a crucial role due to the discrepancy in the associations related to a communicative situation. Such a semantic variation that resonates with the contextual aspect is known under the notion of a register (Matthiessen, 2019). When speaking of languages deriving from different language families and types, the dissonance in ways of message transmission is even more evident. A prime example of such a complicated yet relevant language pairs is the English – Arabic paradigm.
Although having a different number of active language users all over the world, both English and Arabic are common languages in their environments, making it necessary to establish proper functional communication between lingua francas of the Western and Arab worlds. However, despite the relevance in the modern context, the very process of translation is still quite limited in terms of translator’s opportunities related to the text functionality (Abdelmajd & Akan, 2018). These issues might be divided into two major aspects:
- Structure discrepancy. The English language is an analytical language, i.e., it does not obtain a variety of inflections, having modal structures and a fixed word order instead. Arabic language, on the other hand, is an agglutinative synthetic language, implying that it has many inflections to operate the syntactic structures while having a rather limited number of grammatical meanings for each existing morpheme. It means that structural equivalence in the translation is practically impossible, making a translator enhance the target text to preserve functional adequacy (Al-Sulaimaan & Al-Me’mary, 2017).
- Communicative context dissonance. Western and Arab worlds do not share much in common in terms of culture, making it challenging for an intermediator to decode the semantic load of a message faithfully. Since the context stratum is one of the most significant in the functional linguistics paradigm, its failure leads to the absence of adequate equivalent whatsoever (Hijjo & Kadhim, 2017).
The following peculiarities of the translation process lead to the closer investigation of the sentence structure in both languages, regarding some of the most significant functional signifiers. Speaking of the sentences with a single syntactic structure (subject and predicate), the major challenge concerns the difference in the word order because Arabic, unlike English, obtains both verbal and nominative constructions. However, these sentences might still be reproduced with minimum losses during the process (Dendenne, 2010). The real issue for a translator appears when compound and complex sentences are concerned. With the Arabic language having considerably fewer conjunctive markers, the notion of explicitation should be considered.
SFL and Explicitation of Conjunctive Markers
Frequently, in order to provide a faithful translation of the source text, a translator tends to expand the meaning out of the context for it to be comprehensive for a target reader. Such a procedure is called explicitation, which implies leaving no implicit semantic peculiarities in the translation (Baker, 1996). While such an approach is mostly employed by the translators when there is no other way to convey functional meaning, three major types of explicitation might be outlined. They include:
- Elaboration:
- Extension:
- Enhancement (House, 1997).
When applied to the English – Arabic translation paradigm, it should be noted that the major area of explicitation use is considered to be the translation of compound sentences connected with various conjunctive markers. The extensive studies in the filed claim that the texts translated in Arabic undergo a series of extensions in terms of syntactic structure in order to establish a clear message pattern without any ambiguity (Fattah, 2010). One of the most probable reasons behind such a tendency is closely correlated with the number of lexical choices available to the speech actors in each language, with Arabic having fewer conjunctive options in the same communicative situation (Faruquzzaman Akan, Rezaul Karim, & Chowdhury, 2019). For this reason, Fattah (2010) claims Arabic texts to have more constructions with the word “that,” presupposing the elaboration of the given context.
Conclusion
Taking everything into consideration, it might be concluded that while scholars have a full-scale right to prefer a specific approach to the linguistic analysis in terms of translation studies, there is no exhaustive pattern that would satisfy all the language aspects. However, among all the existing models of faithful translation, the functionalist school should be considered, as its principles are not bound to any structural peculiarities of a language. The phenomenon especially applies to the translation of typologically different languages like English and Arabic (analytical – synthetic discrepancy). Systemic functional linguistics is one of the most beneficial ways to evaluate the semantic variable of a text, emphasizing the importance of functional faithfulness in translation.
References
Abdelmajd, A. E. M., & Akan, M. F. (2018). An approach to English-Arabic Translation: problems and proposals. European Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics Studies.
Al-Sulaimaan, M. M. D., & Al-Me’mary, R. I. (2017). Syntactic ambiguity in English-Arabic translation. International Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, 1(1), 99-124.
Baker, C. (1996). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Becker, W. (2020). Metafunctions for benchmarking in sensitivity analysis. Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 204. Web.
Dendenne, B. (2010). The translation of Arabic conjunctions into English and the contribution of the punctuation marks in the target language: the case of Wa, Fa, and Thumma in Modern Standard Arabic. [Master Dissertation, Mentouri University-Constantine].
Eggins, S. (2004). Introduction to systemic functional linguistics. London, UK: A&C Black.
Endarto, I. T. (2017). Systemic functional linguistics: a brief introduction. Research Gate, 1-3.
Faruquzzaman Akan, Md., Rezaul Karim, Md., & Kabir Chowdhury, A. M. (2019). An analysis of Arabic-English translation: problems and prospects. Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 10(1), 58.
Fasold, R., & Connor-Linton, J. (Eds.). (2013). An introduction to language and linguistics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Fattah, A. A. (2010). A corpus-based study of conjunctive explicitation in Arabic translated and non-translated texts written by the same translators/authors. [Doctoral Thesis, University of Manchester]. School of Languages, Linguistics, and Cultures, Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies.
Fernandez, L. (2018). Qualitative interview analysis: the use of systemic functional linguistics to reveal functional meanings. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 19(2).
Finegan, E., & Besnier, N. (1989) Language: its structure and use. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, M. I. M. (2004). An introduction to functional linguistic. (3rd ed.). London, UK: Hodder Arnold.
Hijjo, N. F., & Kadhim, K. A. (2017). The analysis of grammatical shift in English-Arabic translation of BBC media news text. Language in India, 17(10), 79-104.
Key, L. E., & Noble, B. P. (2017). An analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Course in general linguistics.” Cleveland, OH: CRC Press.
Litosseliti, L. (Ed.). (2018). Research methods in linguistics. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Matthiessen, C. M. (2019). Register in systemic functional linguistics. Register Studies, 1(1), 10-41.
Strey, C., & Monawar, M. (2017). Grammatical and communicative competences as one: a study on symbouletic modality. Letras de Hoje, 52(3), 294-301.
Thomas, M. (2019). Formalist and functionalist approaches in linguistics. London, UK: Routledge.