Translation strategies and procedures of in-flight magazines of Gulf Airlines

The purpose of this research is to identify translation procedures and strategies within the area of consumer-oriented texts in English-Arabic translations of in-flight magazine articles. A functionalist approach informs the theoretical framework, which plays the main role in deciding on a suitable approach to a translation. In addition, however, the identification of specific translation procedures and strategies is necessary to establish precise elements to validate outcomes in both the ST and TT data. Therefore, a composite model of 12 translation procedures is formulated based on integrating three key resources for translation procedures: Vinay and Darbelnet (1995), Newmark (1988) and Dickins et al. (2017a). These are supplemented by Vermes’s model (2003) of procedures for the translation of proper names. The resulting composite model is applied to a total of 40 bilingual in-flight magazine articles in English and Arabic, each article comprising 500–2,000 words, in order to highlight the range of procedures, from most to least prominent, for translating general and cultural aspects of English-Arabic texts in in-flight magazines in the Arabian Gulf. Analyses of all the translation procedures adopted are used to deduce translation strategy tendencies on two levels: general and cultural. General strategies are identified in terms of Newmark’s (1988) semantic and communicative translation. The analysis reveals that literal translation, translation by addition and translation by omission are used very frequently when translating in-flight magazine articles, while substitution and proper substitution are the two most frequent procedures used for the translation of proper names. In relation to general translation strategies, the results reveal that both communicative and semantic translation occur frequently in the data, at approximately 54% and 46%, respectively.