A Corpus-Based Descriptive Approach to Build a Bilingual Lexicon of the Egyptian Colloquial Arabic Words on Social Media Platforms and Their English Equivalents

Abstract

Abstract Essentially adopting a descriptive approach to studying corpora, this thesis constructs an Arabic-English lexicon of Contemporary Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (CECA) words using social media streams. It extracts the most frequent CECA words, from a five-million-word corpus of Egyptian Arabic tweets and posts, published in the span from 2012 to 2016. Within the linguistic approach to translation studies, the constructed lexicon portrays the linguistic context within which a word is authentically used in order to identify the possible equivalents in informal American and British English corpora. On translating CECA words into English, the informal American English is proved to harmonize cross-culturally more to the Egyptian culture than the British English does. Moreover, some sociolinguistic information is revealed through the analysis of the CECA corpus. There seems a striking predilection of the Egyptian societal concerns to sentiment and intellectuals. However, deception, malediction and describing outer shapes come atop. Gender preferences of using CECA words demonstrate a significant stratification.