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.