1. Politicians use engaging language to draw in their audience and urge them to vote.
2. This paper examines how engagement markers function in American presidential debates and how they can be translated into Arabic.
3. Omissions or misinterpretations of engagement markers can disrupt the metadiscursive channel and miscommunicate messages, which is particularly challenging when translating between English and Arabic due to the inflectional nature of Arabic and lack of research on metadiscourse markers in Arabic.
The article "Engagement in translation: Interactional metadiscourse markers in American presidential debates" by Farghal and Kalakh explores the use of engaging language in American presidential debates and its potential challenges for translation into Arabic. The authors analyze a corpus of English expressions, including pronouns, appeals to shared knowledge, directives, questions, and personal asides, using Hyland's model of metadiscourse markers and Wieczorek's Clusivity in political discourse.
Overall, the article provides a thorough analysis of the topic at hand and offers valuable insights into the challenges of translating engagement markers from English to Arabic. However, there are some potential biases and limitations that should be considered.
One potential bias is the focus on American presidential debates as the primary source of data. While this is understandable given their relevance to politics and public discourse, it may limit the generalizability of the findings to other contexts or languages. Additionally, the authors do not provide a clear rationale for why they chose Arabic as their target language for translation. This could suggest a bias towards Arabic-speaking audiences or an assumption that Arabic is particularly challenging for translating engagement markers.
Another limitation is that the authors do not provide much evidence or discussion around how these engagement markers are perceived by different audiences or how they might vary across different political contexts or cultures. For example, while they briefly mention Nord's concept of metacommunication in translation, they do not explore how cultural differences might affect how these markers are interpreted or translated.
Furthermore, while the authors acknowledge that Arabic is a highly inflectional language with limited research on metadiscourse markers, they do not provide any concrete examples or evidence to support this claim. This could weaken their argument about the challenges of translating engagement markers into Arabic.
Finally, there is some promotional content towards the end of the article where the authors highlight their own research on translating engagement markers from English to Arabic. While this is understandable given their expertise in this area, it could be seen as partiality towards their own work.
In conclusion, while "Engagement in translation: Interactional metadiscourse markers in American presidential debates" provides valuable insights into an important topic, there are some potential biases and limitations that should be considered when interpreting its findings.