Perlocutionary acts in English- Arabic translation of argumentative discourse

Abstract

Students of English as a foreign language in their translation practice sessions generally encounter difficulties in translating argumentative texts and showing their pragmatic value. They do not succeed in exploiting the relationship between what they study in pragmatics, speech act theory and what they learn from argumentation in translating English argumentative texts. Consequently, this research aims at clarifying the importance of being aware of this relationship and its impact on having an appropriate translation of argumentative texts from English into Arabic. More precisely, it investigates the ability of students of English as a foreign language to understand and recognize the illocutionary force ‘arguing’ of argumentative texts on the one hand and to translate them getting the same perlocutionary effect ‘convincing’ on the other hand. if third year students of English are aware of how important it is to combine their knowledge about speech acts, argumentation and translation in translating English argumentative texts into Arabic, then their performance will be better in terms of understanding the illocutionary force and conveying the same perlocutionary effect at the lexical, grammatical, semantic and pragmatic levels. We also hypothesize that the more Algerian EFL learners are exposed to speech acts and argumentative texts along with their translation, the more their task of producing better translation will be facilitated. For this purpose, an experiment involving a sample of eighty third year undergraduate students of English at the department of English, Mentouri Brothers University- Constantine, was conducted. This population has been divided into control and experimental groups with the latter group undergoing the experiment and the former, i.e. the control group used for giving reliable baseline data against which the results of the experimental group will be compared. In addition, a questionnaire was administered to both groups. The results of the questionnaire emphasize the need to help EFL learners know more about pragmatics and argumentation and how to translate English argumentative texts. The results of the experiment show that the treatment has improved the performance of the experimental group compared to the control group. After getting used to dealing with argumentative discourse and translating four argumentative texts, the students have become aware of the relationship between pragmatics, speech act theory and argumentative discourse in translating English argumentative texts and have also improved in the translation of argumentative texts in terms of recognizing the parts of the text, identifying the speech acts and having appropriate translation. Thus, regarding these results, our hypotheses are confirmed.