Lexical choice in English-Arabic translation

Abstract EN

Lexica! choice falls into the heart of translation activity to which the translator has to pay a lot of attention.

The aim of this paper is to tackle two essential aspects of this task, namely, synonymy and collocation.

In the discussion of both aspects, meaning is taken to be as an entity of two faces: literal and extended.

It is the latter rather than the former on which the present paper relies heavily.

It has been proved that the translator needs to discover the translation-equivalent, at the lexica! level, by referring to the contextual and cultural value with which lexical items are loaded.

The value of this generalization has become quite obvious with the analysis of the translation of some English expressions into Arabic in the areas of synonymy and collocation.