A Translation of Susan Okie's Fed Up: Winning the War Against Childhood Obesity

By

XXXXX

XXXXX

University of XXXX

College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Department of Arabic Language and Literature

Supervisor

Prof. XXXX

12-24-2012

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1 .Introduction

Translation is an important field that has enjoyed a prominent place throughout human

history. It is a complex concept, and as such has inspired different theorists and scholars to

come up with many different definitions to describe what it means. Some theorists such as

Catford see translation as substituting the text in the original language, referred to as the

source language or SL, by equivalent text in a different language, referred to as the target

language or TL (20). Other scholars such as Nida and Taber view translation as "…

reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source-language

message, first in terms of meanings and secondly in terms of style" (12) .

As the above demonstrates, though definitions abound, they all primarily center on

looking at translation as a process of, or at least an attempt at, establishing equivalence

between a source language and a target language. This process is complicated due to the

problems that arise in the process of establishing equivalence. These difficulties come at

different levels, such as the lexical, syntactic, textual, stylistic and cultural levels. As such,

translators should be aware of these difficulties as well as the methods and strategies used to

overcome them.

Part of translation's importance is due to the many functions it performed and continues to

perform. One of the most important roles that translation fulfilled and continues to facilitate

is the distribution of information and the spread of knowledge between different cultures. The

Golden Age of the Islamic world in the Abbasid era was possible in great part due to transfer

of knowledge through translation of the Classics of the time into Arabic, for instance

(Gregorian 27). Furthermore, as per Gregorian "… from the eleventh to the thirteenth

centuries, many Arabic translations of classic works were, in turn, translated into Turkish,

Persian, Hebrew, and Latin" (27). This function of translation is still essential in our modern

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world of course, and one of the fields of study in which utilizing translation is especially

important is that of health. The field of human health has made strides in understanding

diseases of the body that afflict human societies and how to prevent and cure them. These

days, there is a worldwide focus on illnesses that are due to amendable lifestyle choices, and

one such illness is obesity. As per the World Health Organization, or WHO, "Worldwide

obesity has more than doubled since 1980" ("Obesity and Overweight"). This upswing in

obesity rates affects not only adults, but children as well. In fact, the WHO reports that "More

than 40 million children under the age of five were overweight in 2010", and these

overweight children are more likely to become obese, and as a result "… associated with a

higher chance of obesity, premature death and disability in adulthood" ("Obesity and

Overweight"). Thus a lot of research, studies and reports were and continue to be written

about the issue of childhood obesity: how to prevent, understand and treat it. These works

and studies done on the causes, effects and cures of childhood obesity should be translated

into Arabic so that everyone from health providers to parents to educators are aware of the

problems and solutions to this issue, because children of the Arab world are not exempt from

this global epidemic.

The book at hand titled Fed Up: Winning the War against Childhood Obesity by Susan

Okie is an easy read and an informative text that tackles the issue of childhood obesity. It

provides ample background information, gives instructive case studies and offers scientific

advice in overcoming this issue.

In this study, the book Fed Up: Winning the War against Childhood Obesity by Susan

Okie will be translated, and a commentary on the problems the translator encountered during

the translation process will be given. In addition, the strategies and methods used by the

translator to deal with these problems will be explained.

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2. Purpose of the Study

This study aims to accomplish the following:

1. Provide a fluent translation of the selected book titled Fed Up: Winning the War

Against Childhood Obesity from English into Arabic.

2. Identify the problems encountered in the process of translation on the lexical,

syntactic and textual levels.

3. Propose appropriate strategies, methods and solutions to the problems encountered.

3. Significance of the Study

The significance of this study derives from the following points:

1. The rising rates of childhood obesity worldwide have prompted interest in

understanding and finding solutions to this epidemic. As such, this issue has been

subject of scientific and academic research and discussion.

2. The book to be translated is not merely a general overview of the issue, it

interviews children and families suffering from childhood obesity, and it talks to

researchers in this field. It also looks at the problem from a multifaceted point of

view starting from the period of pregnancy and after birth, going through the

family environment and reaching all the way to the school environment and then

the community as a whole. It also provides practical strategies and solutions to

implement in order to solve this problem at all these different levels.

3. There is a serious lack of authoritative books or studies written in the Arabic

language that deal with childhood obesity in an in-depth manner and provide

families, schools and communities with practical strategies and solutions for this

problem in comparison to literature published in English.

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4. The translation of this book will fill a gap in the field of children's health in the

Arabic library seeing as there are hardly enough books on this particular subject

that provide more than a superficial overview or few generalized solutions to what

is a complex matter.

4. Limitations of the Study

There are some impediments to this study. One problem is that there are not nearly enough

academic articles or studies that deal with translating documents in the field of health,

especially pediatric health, into Arabic. Furthermore, since there is a deficiency of Arabic

books that tackle the subject of childhood obesity, there is no consensus on the medical terms

to be used in the process of translation. As such, the Arabic equivalents the translator will

choose to use after much deliberation and research might not be unanimously accepted or

even understood completely. Finally, even though the book provides practical advice that

could be used in any country, it still deals with childhood obesity in the United States

specifically. Furthermore, it adopts an informal tone and utilizes many personal experiences

from children, families and researchers dealing with child obesity. All of this might lead to

Arab readers overlooking the authoritative nature of the translated book and dismissing it as

not being academic enough.

5 .Review of Literature

As mentioned previously, translation has as many definitions as theorists and scholars care

to opine. However, almost all definitions circle back to talking about translation as a process

of establishing equivalence between the source language, SL, and the target language, TL.

But what is equivalence? It must be emphasized that the concept of equivalence is a

controversial one among scholars and theorists. In his essay "On Linguistic Aspects of

Translation", Roman Jakobson identifies three types of translation: intraligual which involves

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rewording or paraphrasing in the same language, interligual that happens between different

languages and intersemiotic which deals with translation between signs (233). When it comes

to interligual translation which is the type translation studies deal with generally, Jakobson

advances the idea of "Equivalence in difference", a notion he reaches as a result of his view

that "… on the level of interlingual translation, there is ordinarily no full equivalence between

code-units" (233). So for Jakobson, a grammatical category available in the source language

but not the target language does not mean that translation cannot take place; it just means that

the translator faces a problem of equivalence and should find a way to solve it (235). Indeed,

"All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language"

according to Jakobson, and where gaps arise "… terminology may be qualified and amplified

by loan-words or loan-translations, neologisms or semantic shifts, and finally, by

circumlocutions" (234). Jakobson's view, in summary, is that equivalence exists between

linguistic items even in the absence of a direct literal correspondence between them .

For their part, Nida and Taber divide equivalence into two types: 1) dynamic equivalence,

and 2) formal correspondence- which was previously termed 'formal equivalence' but was

revised and renamed in the second edition of their book. Dynamic equivalence is defined as a

"… quality of a translation in which the message of the original texts has been so transported

into the receptor language that the RESPONSE of the RECEPTOR is essentially like that of

the original receptors" (Nida and Taber 200). Here the emphasis is on the meaning rather than

the form, and naturally it follows that when tension between both arises, the form is

sacrificed (Nida and Taber 13). Nida and Taber define formal correspondence on the other

hand as an approach wherein the source language's form is maintained as much as possible

during the process of translation, which might sometimes lead to problems in the

comprehensibility of the translated text (201). As all of the previous highlights the fact that

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the dynamic and formal types of equivalence are on opposite sides of each other in terms of

their emphasis on meaning above form and vice versa .

Peter Newmark suggests eight methods of translation that differ in the degrees of their

fidelity to either the source language or the target language, and these methods are: word-for-

word translation, literal translation, faithful translation, semantic translation, adaptation, free

translation, idiomatic translation and communicative translation (45). Among these eight,

Newmark considers the semantic and communicative methods to be the only methods that

"… fulfill the two main aims of translation, which are first, accuracy, and second, economy"

(47). The semantic translation method is defined as being similar to faithful translation in the

sense that both attempt to "… reproduce the precise contextual meaning of the original

within the constraints of the TL grammatical structures", with the difference between the

faithful and semantic methods being that "… the first is uncom-promising and dogmatic,

while the second is more flexible, admits the creative exception to 100% fidelity and allows

for the translator's intuitive empathy with the original" (Newmark 46). Alternatively, the

communicative translation method is defined as "… [rendering] the exact contextual meaning

of the original in such a way that both content and language are readily acceptable and

comprehensible to the readership" (Newmark 47). It should be noted that Newmark's

semantic and communicative translation methods correspond to Nida's notions of dynamic

equivalence and formal correspondence. Nevertheless, Newmark disagrees with the notion of

what he calls the Equivalent Effect, which is basically Nida's Dynamic Equivalence, in that

he does not accept the idea of producing a translation with the aim of having the same effect

on the readers that the original had on its readers. Instead Newmark views this effect as

occurring as a result of the process of translation rather than a goal of it (48), so Newmark

was actually critical of Nida.

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For her part, Mona Baker regards the term equivalence as not holding any special status,

and she states in the introduction to her book In Other Words that the only reason she uses the

word equivalence is "… for the sake of convenience" (5). For Baker, equivalence exists and

should be studied on several levels. In her book, she discusses these problems from the

lowest level which is at the word level, moving to above world level, passing by grammatical

level, proceeding to the textual level and then finally reaching the pragmatic level (Baker 5).

It comes as no surprise that defining what equivalence is leads to becoming conscious of

the problem of non-equivalence. In general, the farther away two languages are from each

other in terms of their genetic makeup and geographical/ cultural distance, the farther away

the linguistic and cultural aspects of those two languages are, and thus the more difficult the

task of establishing equivalence is. Baker tackles some problems of non-equivalence on all of

the five equivalence levels mentioned above and provides a number of solutions to them. At

word level, Baker discusses some non-equivalence problems such as culture-specific

concepts, semantically complex words and differences in expressive meaning among other

problems (21-22, 23) .

Strategies to deal with problems at word level as per Baker include translation using a

more general word, using a neutral or less expressive word and using cultural substitution and

these are only a few examples of strategies used by professional translators to overcome non-

equivalence problems at the word level (26, 28, 31) .

On non-equivalence problems above word level, Baker talks about the problems

encountered in translating collocations, idioms and fixed expressions (47). Some of the

problems with collocations arise due to assigning an incorrect meaning to them, or because of

the cultural-specificity of the collocation, plus other various issues (Baker 55, 59). Baker

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briefly touches upon some solutions for these problems, like replacing collocations in the

source language with established target language collocations, for instance (56) .

As for idioms, Baker indicates that the biggest difficulty is due to the fact that to translate

an idiom correctly, the translator has to be able first to identify that the construct they face is

in fact an idiom (65). Various problems occur in the process of translating idioms due to

many issues, such as the absence of an equivalent idiom in the target language and the fact

that an idiom might be utilized simultaneously in an idiomatic and literal manner (Baker 68-

69). These are only two examples of the problems Baker talks about when it comes to idioms.

Baker provides many strategies for dealing with the problems that arise when attempting

translation of idioms. One strategy is finding and using an idiom of similar meaning and

similar form (Baker 72). When such an idiom is unavailable, the strategy moves to using an

idiom of similar meaning and dissimilar form (Baker 74). These strategies descended from

the strongest to the weakest, which is omission (Baker 77).

Baker also talks about the problems of non-equivalence on the grammatical level. Because

grammar systems are naturally different (Baker 85), when dealing with two different

languages translators are bound to face difficulties. So, grammatical categories such as

number, gender, person, voice and tense and aspect might exist in the source language but not

the target language which creates difficulties within the process of translation (Baker 87-

110) .

According to Baker, problems at the textual level have to do with the thematic/

information structures and cohesion and how both are achieved in the source language text

and the target language text (119-225). Non-equivalence problems on the pragmatic level are

concerned by the implicit communicative meaning of a text (Baker 217-259).

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6 .Research Methodology

The main aim of this study is to produce as good a translation as possible of the English

language book Fed Up, and to that end the translator will be using a combination of the

communicative and semantic translation methods, which have been already explained. These

methods are adopted because the communicative method is concerned with the target

language rather than the source language and as such will help the text be more reader

friendly, while the semantic method will help maintain the accuracy of the source text .

6.1 .Research Instruments

The translator will rely on dictionaries in the process of translation. In addition, she will

utilize online dictionaries and glossaries for any specialized terms, collocations and idioms

that she will face. Internet searches and reading up articles and studies will be done when

necessary .

6.2 .Research Procedures

A time frame for the translation is set. The text will be read for the first time in order to

have a general overview of it. Next the translation process starts along with the commentary.

The translation problems and issues that are bound to surface throughout the process will be

identified and the level on which they occur (lexical, grammatical, textual, etc.) will be

described. Then the items that have come up in each level will be arranged into separate

groups- with each level as a heading- and the individual problems will be explained along

with the strategies used to deal with them. After that, the translation will be read one last time

in order to ensure it is free of mistakes and reads like a fluent and natural text.

7 .Data Analysis

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In the process of translating the book, many problems were encountered. These problems

were on the lexical, grammatical and textual levels. Brief explanations of each identified

problem, along with illustrative examples of them and how they were solved are described

below:

1 .Lexical Problems

Naturally, different languages use different words to express concepts, notions and ideas.

Sometimes the same concept will be expressed by different words and other times the same

words will contain different connotative meanings. Some languages assign a word to a

specific idea that does not exist in another language. This clash is the reason lexical problems

occur .

As mentioned previously, lexical problems can be found on both the word and above word

levels. Examples for both are given below :

1.1 .Non-equivalence at Word Level

Some of the non-equivalence problems at word level encountered in the translation

process:

1.1.1 .Synonymy

In linguistics, a synonym is "… a word that means the same or nearly the same as another

word" according to The Free Dictionary .

Example on page 2:

The words pasta, macaroni, noodles and spaghetti can be all considered synonymous.

They are used when describing a school activity one of the overweight children interviewed

in the book is engaging in with her best friend. If the differences between these words were to

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be fleshed out, then we'd either end up with four unnecessary transliterations, or too many

additional words to explain the distinctions between them, which would lead to an awkward

and unnatural Arabic text. That's why the translator decided to forego emphasizing these

small dissimilarities and go with translating all of these words as .

1.1.2 .Use of interjections

According the Ameka, interjections “… form a significant subset of those seemingly

irrational devices that constitute the essence of communication” (qtd in Thawabteh 5). Carter

and McCarthy have noted that interjections affect discourse because implicit within them are

hidden meanings which illuminate the responses and reactions of the speaker to the discourse

(qtd in Thawabteh 6). So, interjections play an important role in facilitating communication .

Example on page 2:

In the quotation "Mmm, tasty" the interjection Mmm is used to signify satisfaction and

pleasure. Since an equivalent Arabic interjection is available, the translator simply translated

this interjection literally into , which signals the same emotions in Arabic when used in

this context .

1.1.3 .Acronyms:

According to online dictionary Merriam-Webster, acronyms are defined as "… a word (as

NATO, radar, or laser) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts

or major parts of a compound term; also : an abbreviation (as FBI) formed from initial

letters" (author's emphasis) .

Example from title page :

ممم

المعكرونة

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The author's name is followed by the acronym M.D., which stands for Medical Doctor, or

in other words holding a degree allowing the author to work as a doctor. The term used in

Arabic to describe this degree is . Since there is no Arabic acronym to describe

this degree, unlike English, and because creating an acronym from the initial letters of

will produce which is nonsensical in this context as it is not recognized

nor accepted unanimously, the translator decided to translate the full meaning of the term

rather than use an acronym .

1.2 .Non-Equivalence above Word Level

A few of the non-equivalence problems above world level that were encountered are as

follows :

1.2.1 .Collocations

According to Oxford Dictionaries online, collocations are "… the habitual juxtaposition of

a particular word with another word or words with a frequency greater than chance". In other

terms, some words co-occur together frequently, and these are called collocations.

Example on page 1:

The collocation tend goal has an equivalent in Arabic that the translator searched for and

found, which is , so since an equivalent collocation exists, it was used.

1.2.2 .Idioms

Loos, et al, briefly explain that an idiom is "… a multiword construction that is a

semantic unit whose meaning cannot be deduced from the meanings of its

constituents, and has a non-productive syntactic structure" ("What is an idiom") .

Example on page 2:

الطب في دكتوراه

الطب في .دكتوراه ط. د

حراسة

المرمى

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The traffic is described as being "bumper to bumper". This is an idiom that means

to convey that the traffic is moving very slowly. The translator could not find an

Arabic idiom equivalent in form and meaning nor could she find one that was

equivalent in meaning but not in form that was appropriate and didn't sound strange in

this context, and so she decided to translate the meaning of the idiom and discard the

form. As such, the translation of this idiom is.

1.2.3 .Compounds

In the simplest terms, and as per The Free Dictionary, a compound is "a word composed

of two or more words". Wikipedia tells us that compounds specifically speaking are created

through bringing together two or more words that are already established, which leads to the

creation of a new word with a new meaning, and so compounding is basically one of the

ways languages compose and come up with new words ("Compound (linguistics)"). There

are three types of compounds when it comes to form: "… the closed form, in which the words

are melded together… the hyphenated form… and the open form" (Capital Community

College Foundation). Some of examples the translator came across :

1.2.3.1 .Closed Form Compounds

Example on page 1:

The closed form compound classmates is translated as . It could have

been left as merely and it would have been probably understood from context, but for

the sake of disambiguating the meaning completely the translator chose to add.

1.2.3.2 .Hyphenated Compounds

Example on page 2 :

بطيئة

� جدا

في زمالئها

المدرسة زمالئها

في

المدرسة

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The hyphenated compound single-story is translated as , which fulfills the

meaning of the compound .

1.2.3.3 .Open Form Compounds

Example on page 2 :

The word ice cream is an open form compound and it is translated as . The first

thought the translator had was to transliterate the word, since some other candy names that

had no equivalents in Arabic were transliterated. However, since not all of those names had

been transliterated and this particular open form compound already has an equivalent in

Arabic, the translator decided to use the equivalent available .

1.2.4 .Cultural-specific terms

Cultural specific terms are those terms which are related to the culture they were born in.

Concepts that only occur in specific cultures will be lexicalized to fit in that culture, and as

such are difficult and sometimes impossible to translate into another culture. Examples of

cultural specific terms are:

Example on page 2:

The term cancan kicks talks about the style of kicks performed in a music hall

French dance. Because in the context it occurs in, wherein Megan and her friends are

competing to see who can perform the highest cancan kick, it's not important that the

kind of kick they do is associated with the cancan dance. Having to explain what the

cancan dance is would have taken up space and still be considered useless in this

context. That is why the translator opted to omit the mentioning of 'cancan' and used

the general term of instead .

1.2.5 .Technical Terms

طابق ذات

واحد

بوظة

ركلة

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According to Wikipedia, technical terms are "the specialized vocabulary of any field, not

just technical fields" while Jargon "… is similar, but more informal in definition and in use"

("Technical terminology") .

Example from subtitle:

Obesity is the topic of this book and is used in the subtitle and repeated many times

throughout the text. The translator was initially considering three translations, which are :

الوزن .1 فرط

السمنة .2 فرط

البدانة .3 فرط

After some research, and as per as the World Health Organization Arabic webpage ,

I discovered that the actual term is simply In addition ,

Actually means 'overweight' and not obesity. The confusion remains over whether the

term is actually the general consensus for obesity, as research on the internet

showed me that it is used to describe an obese and an overweight person

interchangeable. The translator committed to this term because the WHO uses it .

1.2.6 .Proper Nouns

Proper nouns basically mean those names that are specific to a person, a place or a

thing (Loos, et al. "What is a proper noun")

1.2.6.1 .Names of People

Examples on pages 1, 2 and 3:

The names of people mentioned in the book such as Meagan, Julia and others are all

transliterated. So they become Since the whole book is culturally tied to the

. (" الوزن(" وفرط السمنة

السمنة

الوزن فرط

السمنة

ميجان andجوليا.

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United States, it makes sense to transliterate the names rather than attempt a strategy of

domestication .

2 .Grammatical Problems

Grammatical problems in translation relate to those difficulties that occur in the

process of rendering a text from one language to another because of the differences in

the grammatical systems of both languages. Some of the grammatical problems faced

in the process of translating this book are as follows:

2.1 .Word Order

Through a general examination of English and Arabic, one would find that both

retain different word orders when it comes to verbs, subjects and objects in the

context of sentence structures as well as the word order of modifiers and adverbials

(Wikipedia "Word order") .

Example on page 2:

Hot chocolate is translated into Arabic by rearranging the word order, and so it

becomes , and because the adjective follows the noun in Arabic,

changing the word order of the English- where the adjective precedes the noun- was

necessary to achieve a correct Arabic translation .

2.2 .Passive and Active Voice

In English, a passive sentence might be agentless or agentive, and there are many

features and traits specific to English passive and active sentence structures (Baker

102-109). Arabic's rules and traits for passive and active sentence structures differ,

and Arabic as a rule prefers active structures to passive ones (Khafaji 19).

Example on page 2:

الساخنة الشوكوالتة

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" Meagan and her best friend, Julia, are assigned a special activity" is a passive

sentence. The agent is without doubt their teacher. Because Arabic prefers an active

structure and the agent is known from the context, the appropriate translation is

. خاص بنشاط القيام جوليا المفضلة وصديقتها ميجان على المعلمة تعين

So the passive is turned into active voice .

2.3 .Phrasal verbs

A phrasal verb consists of a "… verb and one or more following particles and

acting as a complete syntactic and semantic unit" (The Free Dictionary) .

Example in the title:

The tile of this book is Fed Up, which is a phrasal verb. It is also a pun. The

translator looked for an equivalent Arabic phrasal verb and found , which

works as well as a pun as it was intended to be in the original text .

2.4 .Agreement Issus

Agreement is defined as "The correspondence of a verb with its subject in person

and number, and of a pronoun with its antecedent in person, number, and gender"

(Nordquist "Agreement") .

2.4.1 .Gender

Example on page 1:

The word dietitian in the quote "Meagan has seen a dietitian, who taught her about

portion sizes and how to rate her hunger on a scale of 1 to 10" does not tell us the

gender of the dietitian since in general words in English lack a feminine or masculine

quality. Nor is any context beyond that sentence available that might clue the

translator on the gender of the dietitian. In the absence of any information, the

translator decided to write the dietitian as female due to the fact that most dietitians do

tend to be women. So the translation is:

الكيل طفح

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جوعها" تقدر وكيف الطعام وجبات أحجام عن علمتها تغذية مستشارة ميجان زارت لقد

" عشرة إلى واحد مقياس على

The whole sentence is turned into active and the verb made to agree with the feminine

noun as is appropriate for Arabic (Al-Muhtaseb and Mellish 5) .

2.4.2 .Number

Example on page 1:

In Arabic, "Some agreements in number (and other features) should be imposed in

between verbs and names" (Al-Muhtaseb and Mellish 10), and while English does not

have a grammatical category of dual, Arabic does. So when 2 miles is translated it

becomes . So the English lexical item '2' becomes a grammatical

category in Arabic that is inflected as per it's placement in the sentence.

3 .Textual Problems

Textual problems are those problems that arise on the level of the text during the

translation task. These relate to the comprehensibility, coherence and cohesion of the

text. Examples on this aspect are as follows :

3.1 .Connectors and Punctuation

Connecters are one of the most used cohesive devices that allow the text to flow

smoothly and cohesively. Punctuation marks, too, help greatly in creating this

cohesiveness.

Example on page 1:

Meagan gets up early, before her father and brother are awake, and fries up a

batch of soy bacon. Ten and a half years old, she is a committed vegetarian

who likes the taste of meat, and she is ravenous. She washes the bacon down

with a glass of water, then gets ready for school. She’s in the fifth grade at a

ميلين بعد على تقع

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public school about 2 miles from her home in Palos Verdes, a seaside Los

Angeles suburb .

The Arabic translation on the other hand is:

من مصنوع المقدد للحم � نباتيا � بديال لتقلي وأخاها والدها قبل � باكرا ميجان تستيقظ

الغذائي بالنظام ملتزمة العمر من والنصف العاشرة في طفلة فهي الصويا،

ميجان وتتبع بنهم، أعدته الذي الطعام تلتهم فتراها اللحم طعم وتحب النباتي

الصف في طالبة هي حيث للمدرسة، للذهاب تستعد ثم ماء بكوب وجبتها

ضاحية في الواقع منزلها من ميلين بعد على تقع حكومية مدرسة في الخامس

. فيرديس بالوس اسمها أنجيلوس لوس في ساحلية

English prefers full short sentences that give you an idea before moving to the next in a

cohesive manner, while Arabic is attracted to long continuous sentences generously sprinkled

with connectors that bind them together in one smooth flow. In the English text, there are

four complete sentences, while the Arabic translation consists of only one long sentence. The

Arabic translation contains about seven or eight repetitions of a few connectors such as

. The usage of these connectives, along with the usage of commas throughout the translated

text and a period at the end of it, both assist in making the Arabic translation run smoothly

and achieve a cohesive quality. This helps greatly in making the translation an appropriate

and correct one.

8 .Conclusion

The purpose of this study is to produce an appropriate translation of the book Fed

Up: Winning the War Against Childhood Obesity by Susan Okie. In order to

accomplish that, the problems of non-equivalence at the lexical, grammatical and

textual levels will be explored. Solutions for the difficulties identified will be then

proposed and implemented. The result is what is hopefully considered a reader

and ف و، ،

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friendly and informative text that could be a source of enrichment to the Arabic

library .

9 .Recommendations

1 .Translator trainees should recognize that it's not enough to rely on dictionaries

alone as they do not give the full meanings of terms and words in different

contexts .

2 .Translator trainees should make use of the internet when terms and concepts

prove difficult to decipher even after consulting dictionaries, or if they are facing

concepts that are too cultural specific and background information about them is

needed. Online searches also assist in determining how widespread the use of a

term is, and in this way they help the translator decide on which term to use when

several options are available .

22

Works Cited

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Dec. 2012 .

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1992 .Print.

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Dec. 2012.

"Collocation". Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press, April 2010. Web. 24

Dec. 2012.

Okie, Susan. Fed Up: Winning the War Against Childhood Obesity. Washington :

Jospeh Henry, 2005. Print .

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Print.

Jakobson, Roman. "On Linguistc Aspects of Translation." Stanford. Stanford. Web .

19 Dec. 2012.

Khafaji, Rasoul. "Arabic Translation Alternatives for the Passive in English." UAM .

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Loos Eugene, et al, eds."What is an Idiom?" Glossary of Linguistic Terms. SIL

International, 29 Jan. 2004 .

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Newmark, Peter. A Textbook of Translation. New York: Prentice Hall, 1988. Print .

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Reprint. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Print.

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2012 .Web. 20 Dec. 2012.

"Phrasal verbs." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language ,

Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.Web. 20 Dec. 2012.

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Dec. 2012.

Thawabteh, Mohammad. "The Translatability of Interjections: A Case Study of Arabic -

English Subtitling." Érudit 55.3 (2010): 400-515. Web. 20 Dec. 2012.

World Health Organization. World Health Organization, May 2012. Web ". .وفرط السمنة

الوزن" 20 Dec. 2012.

24

Appendix 1

The Translated Text:

! الكيل طفح

. األطفال لدى السمنة ضد الحرب في ننتصر كيف

الطب في دكتوراه أوكي، سوزان

األسمن الجيل

فهي الصويا، من مصنوع المقدد للحم � نباتيا � بديال لتقلي وأخاها والدها قبل � باكرا ميجان تستيقظفتراها اللحم طعم وتحب النباتي الغذائي بالنظام ملتزمة العمر من والنصف العاشرة في طفلة

حيث للمدرسة، للذهاب تستعد ثم ماء بكوب وجبتها ميجان وتتبع بنهم، أعدته الذي الطعام تلتهمفي الواقع منزلها من ميلين بعد على تقع حكومية مدرسة في الخامس الصف في طالبة هي

. فيرديس بالوس اسمها أنجيلوس لوس في ساحلية ضاحية

و ذكية طفلة وهي جديدة، طبية نظارات وترتدي حصان ذيل شكل على تربطه بني شعر لميجانالرقص تحب منبسطة اجتماعية شخصية امتالكها إلى إضافة اآلخرين، تضحك كيف تعرف

. فيها تشترك التي القدم كرة مباريات في المرمى وحراسة والغناء

محط يجعلها بدأ الذي األمر وسطها، حول بخاصة األخيرة اآلونة في زاد ميجان وزن أن إالوقد كطبيبن يعمالن اللذان والديها قلق ويثير األحيان، بعض في المدرسة في زمالئها سخريةوغيرها الدم ضغط زيادة و القلب كأمراض األعراض من � كثيرا المهنية حياتهما فترة طوال عالجا

. البالغين لدى السمنة فرط يسببها التي المضاعفات من

على جوعها تقدر وكيف الطعام وجبات أحجام عن علمتها تغذية مستشارة ميجان زارت ولقدأن وتود عشرة، إلى واحد مقياس

)1الصفحة(

كرة لعب عند أسرع بشكل الحركة تستطيع ولكي زمالئها سخرية لتتوقف وزنها من تنقص. تأكله الذي الطعام وعلى حياتها على مسيطرة تكون أن في رغبتها ذلك من األهم أن إال القدم،

وتحب السكني، حيها من القريبة والبوظة الدوناتز متاجر كافة تسمية ويمكنها الحلوى تحب فهيويقوم شوكوالتة رقاقات أو المفضلة حلوياتكم تختاروا أن يمكن حيث بوظة متجر باألخص

. " ميجان " حسب البوظة في بهرسها المحل في العاملون

على للدراجات مخصص ممر وجود من الرغم وعلى اليوم، هذا صباح في � جدا بطيئة السير حركةأن عليها والديها يلح حيث المدرسة، إلى دراجتها ميجان تركب أن النادر من أنه إال الطريق جانب

يصعب أنه إال السير، حركة بشأن قلقهما رغم الرياضية التمارين من i قسطا تنال حتى ذلك تفعلالبوق حمل تستطيع ال أنها كما االنحدار، شديدة الطريق أجزاء في بالدراجة التحكم ميجان على

من فإنه بالنهاية المدرسية، الموسيقية الفرقة مع فيها تتدرب التي األيام في تحتاجه الذي

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� ركوبا بالذهاب إقناعها عن � عوضا بالسيارة المدرسة إلى اصطحابها ميجان والدي على األسهل. دراجتها على

ومماشي، ساحات تربطها واحد طابق ذات مباني مجموعة من اإلبتدائية ميجان مدرسة تتكون . للطلبة يسمح أخرى ورياضات القدم كرة للعب كبيرة معشبة وساحة مالعب خلفها ويقع

على لتتأرجح دورها ميجان وتنتظر األول، الجرس يدق أن بعد الملعب على دقائق بضع المكوثلتتارجح الوقت يتسع دقائق عشرة مرور وبعد كبيرة، سيارة عجلة إطار من مصنوعة أرجوحة

إلى الذهاب عليها ويتوجب الثاني الجرس يدق أن قبل فقط واحدة مرة األرجوحة على ميجانالفصل.

خاص بنشاط القيام جوليا المفضلة وصديقتها ميجان على المعلمة تعين اليوم هذا صباح وفيوصمغ، مجففة معكرونة باستخدام نموذج بناء ثم اإلنترنت على الجسور تصميم عن البحث وهووذلك شديدة بعناية الصمغ باستخدام البعض ببعضها المجففة المعكرونة نهايات بلصق فقامتا

بوضع يرضيان النهاية في جعلهما مما ينهار، ظل صنعتاه ما أن إال قنطرة، صنع أمل على. عادي جسر لصنع جنب إلى � جنبا المعكرونة

وحين المجففة، المعكرونة من أجزاء فتأكالن بالجوع، بالشعور الطفلتين وتبدأ ونصف ساعة تمروفي – الكالم وكثيرة نحيفة طفلة وهي جوليا وتقوم الساحة، إلى تخرجان الفرصة وقت يحين

- حلوى فيه � بالستيكيا � كيسا كذلك وتفتح ساخن شوكوال شراب فيه ترموس غطاء بفتح دائبة حركة" الساخنة؟ " الشوكوال بعض أتريدين ميجان، وتسأل المارشميلو

" " غمس " نستطيع ربما وتضيف ألذه، ما ممم، بالشراب تتلذ وهي وتقول ميجان فتقبل". فيها المجففة المعكرونة

الفتيات فتبدأ المارشميلوز، عليهن جوليا تمرر و األخريات صديقاتهما الطفلتين إلى ينضم ثموبعدها ركلة، أعلى تنفيذ يمكنها من لتحديد يتنافسن ثم أفواههن، في والتقاطها � عاليا بقذفها

" " . توقعت رجلي، بشق قمت إذا الجينز بنطالي سيتمزق الجمبازية رجلين شق حركة أوسعميجان.

)2الصفحة(

26

Appendix 2

The Original Text:

Fed Up!

Winning the War Against Childhood Obesity

Susan Okie, M.D.

The Fattest Generation

Meagan gets up early, before her father and brother are awake, and fries up a batch of soy bacon .

Ten and a half years old, she is a committed vegetarian who likes the taste of meat, and she is ravenous.

She washes the bacon down with a glass of water, then gets ready for school .

She’s in the fifth grade at a public school about 2 miles from her home in Palos Verdes, a seaside Los Angeles suburb.

Meagan has shiny brown hair in a ponytail and new glasses. Smart and funny, she’s an extrovert who loves to sing and dance and to tend goal in soccer games.

Recently, though, she has gained a lot of weight, especially around her middle—a fact that has started to provoke occasional teasing by classmates and to worry her parents, both of

27

them doctors who have been treating heart disease, high blood pressure, and other complications of obesity in adults for their entire careers.

Meagan has seen a dietitian, who taught her about portion sizes and how to rate her hunger on a scale of 1 to 10. She would like to

)Page 1(

be leaner, to put a stop to the teasing, and to be able to move faster in soccer, but she also wants to be in charge of her own life and of what she eats.

She loves sweets and can name all the doughnut and ice cream stores near her neighborhood. She’s especially partial to one ice cream parlor where you can choose your favorite candy bar

or chocolate chips and they “mush it in”.

This morning traffic is bumper to bumper on the way to school. Although there’s a bike lane beside the road, Meagan rarely rides to school. Despite their concerns about the traffic, her parents have been urging her to do so for the sake of the exercise, but she has difficulty pedaling the steepest part of the route, and she can’t transport her cornet by bicycle on band practice days. Driving her to school is usually easier for her mother and father than overcoming her resistance .

The elementary school is a cluster of single-story buildings connected by courtyards and walkways, backed by playgrounds and a large grassy field for soccer and other games. After the first bell rings, students are allowed a few minutes on the playground. Meagan waits for a turn to spin on a big tire swing. Ten minutes and one spin later, the second bell sends her off to homeroom .

This morning Meagan and her best friend, Julia, are assigned a special activity: they are to research bridge design on the Internet and build an example using dried pasta and glue. Hoping to make an arch, they painstakingly glue tubes of macaroni end to end, but their constructions keep falling apart. Eventually they settle for laying out noodles side by side to make a beam bridge .

Ninety minutes go by, and the girls get hungry. They munch on pieces of dried spaghetti. At recess the two go outside to the courtyard. Julia, chatty, slender, and constantly in motion, unscrews a thermos of steaming hot chocolate and opens a plastic bag of marshmallows. “Meagan, you want hot chocolate?” “Mmm, tasty,” says Meagan, slurping a cupful. “Maybe

we can dip the noodles ”.

Friends join them and Julia passes around the marshmallows. The girls throw them in the air and catch them in their mouths. They compete to see who can do the highest cancan kicks, then the widest split. “I’m going to break my jeans if I do a split,” Meagan predicts .

)Page 2(

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