On Translating Semantic Prosody: A Corpus-based Cognitive-Semantic Approach

Abstract

The arbitrary and independent nature of collocations has attracted translation scholars, trainers and practitioners alike. However, they have been, for the large part, addressed from a structuralist and/or lexical semanticist point of view, dealing with them as a static phenomenon whose meaning is isolated in the lexeme. A corpus-based cognitive semantic approach offers insights that might prove indispensable, as it views meaning, in general, and the meaning of collocations, in particular, as a mental phenomenon that is rather idiosyncratic, strongly context-dependent, and part of the encyclopedic knowledge that is far from being static. One of these insights is Semantic Prosody (SP), or the implied attitudinal meaning of a collocation; a phenomenon that is more widespread than traditionally assumed and one that cannot be reliably retrieved through intuition or introspection. Ignorance, or disregard, of SP can result in using clichéd, established translation equivalents for collocations that have prosodic differences leading to a clash that alters or blurs the meaning of the Source Text, resulting in a comic or ironic effect in the Target Text. As an insignificant number of empirical studies have addressed SP in English and Arabic as a language pair in translation, this study aims at bridging this gap.