Investigating lexical cohesive devices in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” in Arabic translation

Abstract EN

With the aim of investigating the lexical cohesive devices, a short story from the American literature; namely, ―The Tell-Tale Heart‖ by Edgar Allan Poe, is tackled as the data of study.

The study adopts the framework of Halliday and Hasan‘s (1976) by which two major categories of lexical cohesion; reiteration and collocation are examined.

To make the investigation possible, a full explanation of the lexical cohesive devices in both English and Arabic is presented to have a vivid image of the differences and similarities between them and to discuss their possible effect on translation.

A mixture of qualitative and quantitative research method is employed to calculate the frequencies of each device in Poe‘s ―The Tell Tale Heart‖ and Al-Halawani‘s (2015) Arabic rendition and their percentages.

The results obtained reveal that lexical cohesion in Poe‘s short story is founded on repetition, synonymy and collocation but the inadequate command of these devices by the translator leads to the distortion of translation