Reporting the Iraq War: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Stylistic Analysis of Selected English Translations of Iraq War Poetry

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Faculty of Language Studies, Arab Open University (AOU), Egypt.

Abstract

The Iraq War started in 2003 and ended in 2011. The Iraqi battlefield raised the consciousness of Iraqi poets, especially the exiled, who reported the war in their poetic narratives. Translating these poems into English facilitated the promotion of the poets’ ideology among a larger audience. In this respect, this study adopts a corpus-assisted critical stylistic approach to investigate the similarities and differences in the ideological positioning of the English translation of Dunya Mikhail’s poem, Akyas Gothath (Bags of bones) and Abdul Razaq Al-Rubaiee’s Ghadan Takhrug Al-Harb lel Nozha (Tomorrow the war will have a picnic) in terms of the motion-stillness dichotomy. Specific linguistic patterns from the studied texts are tagged using the TagAnt software version 2.0.5, and selected textual-conceptual functions (TCFs) from Leslie Jeffries’ (2010) Critical Stylistics (CS) model are qualitatively examined. The study, therefore, reveals each poet’s gaze on the Iraq War and the dominant textual-conceptual functions employed by the translator.

Keywords

Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies
Volume 5, Issue 1
Special Issue
2023
Pages 183-201

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