Dr. Mahmoud Altarabin, who is a lecturer in the English Department at Islamic university and holder of PhD in translation studies, has recently published his brand-new book, entitled “The Routledge Course on Media, Legal and Technical Translation” in Cooperation with the Routledge British multinational publisher.
Dr. Altarabin mentioned that it was the translation 3 course in 2016/2017 that pushed him to work on this book since the course was comprehensive of various topics in translation: media, legal, technical and general. “There were no special books ever tackling such topics together,” he said.
This English-Arabic-English book is an indispensable and engaging coursebook for university students to develop their English-Arabic-English translation skills in these three text types. Taking a practical approach, the book introduces Arab translation students to common translation strategies in addition to the linguistic, syntactic, and stylistic features of media, legal, and technical texts.
The book contains four comprehensive chapters covering media, legal, and technical texts, which are of immense importance to Arab translation students. In the first chapter, the author provided a summary of definitions for the process of translation discussing the equivalence concept between Arabic and English languages. Strategies of translation in addition to the tools the translator needs for facilitating the process are also included in this chapter. In the second chapter, the author dealt with media translation as he discussed advanced translations in the context of the Palestinian issue throwing the light on the role of the translator in conflict rejoins. In this regard, he presented some chief contents of newspapers and the opinions of editors. On the other hand, in the third chapter, the author focused on the legal translation as he provided an extensive explanation of the characteristics of the vocabulary and compositions of Arabic and English legal texts with examples of the two languages. The four chapter handled the characteristics of the technical texts and translation strategies followed whilst doing financial, commercial, and medical texts.
This book features texts carefully selected for their technical relevance. The key features include: detailed and clear explanations of the lexical, syntactic, and stylistic features of English and Arabic media, legal, and technical texts; up-to-date and practical translation examples in both directions offering students actual experiences of professional translators are also included. The book, in addition, contains authentic texts extracted from various sources to promote students’ familiarity with language features and use. The author was keen to include extensive range of exercises following each section of the book to enable students to test and practice the knowledge and skills they developed from reading previous sections;
Dr. AlTarabin said that the easy, practical, and comprehensive approach adopted in the book makes it a must-have coursebook for intermediate and advanced students studying translation between English and Arabic. University instructors and professional translators working on translation between English and Arabic will find this book particularly useful.
