A semantic analysis of some media verbs in English and Arabic : a contrastive study

Abstract EN

The study deals with what is believed to be a point of disagreement between English and Arabic, i.e., the semantic range of some media verbs.

In fact, one of the general problems found between languages is the disparity in the semantic range among the vocabularies of one language and their counterparts in another language.

That is, generally speaking, any vocabulary in one language has a set of lexical senses listed under its entry in the dictionary.

Some of these senses may be shared with its counterpart vocabulary in the other language, whereas the other senses could be particular to that vocabulary and not available to its counterpart vocabulary.

This is true for both English and Arabic.

The error that many translators commit especially in the beginners level is that these translators, who may be not fully acquainted with the semantic range of the counterparts of vocabularies, may mistakenly use one sense in their translations instead of another or generalize one sense to the others.The current study investigates the semantic range of only some of the media verbs in English and Arabic since it is not possible to deal with all the verbs of the media in a single study.

The study deals with some of the most common verbs that recur in the media of English and Arabic.

The main problem of the study is that some translators and foreign learners of both languages attempt, in their use of these media verbs, to mistakenly generalize one sense, especially the most familiar to them, and misuse it where some other senses should be used.

The result is mistranslation and misunderstanding between interlocutors, or sometimes a complete communication failure.

The study holds that there are differences in the semantic range of the investigated verbs in English and Arabic and aims to enlighten the reader with the semantic range of these verbs in general and the differences found in this semantic range among the verbs in particular.The study consists of three sections the first is an introduction for the subject.

The second section is the theoretical part of the study and incorporates two subsections.

The first one embodies the selected English media verbs, whereas the second deals with the Arabic media verbs.

The third section is the practical part of the study.

It consists of two tests in the form of tables the first of which is for English verbs and the second is for Arabic ones.

The tests are given at first to a group of translators at the beginners’ level in order to provide their translations, then the tests with the translations are submitted to a set of professional translators for evaluation and providing their ones.

Afterwards, an analytic discussion is conducted after each test to find out the similarities and differences between English and Arabic media verbs as far as the semantic range is concerned.

The study arrives at a number of findings the main of which are that there are no English and Arabic media verbs which are identical counterparts in their semantic range, and that especially the translators of the beginners’ level have the problem of generalizing certain senses to the others.