A Comparative Stylistic Analysis of an English Literary Work and its Arabic Translation Sample Cases from ―A Tale of Two Cities‖

Abstract

The present research is an attempt to approach the field of comparative stylistics within the linguistic framework. The study aims to explore and analyze the stylistic characteristics of Dickens in his novel "An Account of Two Cities" by comparing them with the treatment of Al-Ba'albaki in his Arabic translation in order to study to what extent the style of a writer can be transferred to another language. Accordingly, our hypothesis is that the translation of the stylistic features of an English literary text into Arabic would be possible and successful if the translator maintained a flexible yet faithful translation by creating authentic equivalences to the stylistic devices used by the writer, taking into account radical differences between the linguistic systems of the two languages. Accordingly, the objective of this study will be achieved through a qualitative methodology with an analytical and comparative perspective. The study is divided into two chapters. The first chapter is, in turn, divided into two sections which respectively have a theoretical overview of the main areas of stylistics and comparative stylistics. The second chapter is the analytical framework of this research in which a comparative stylistic analysis of the novel and its Arabic version is carried out. The analysis is done on four levels of language: phonological, graphological, syntactic and semantic which are suggested by Leech and Short. The novel written by one of the most famous writers of all time and translated by one of the best-known translators in the Arab world makes it useful material for better understanding the relationship between disciplines such as stylistics and translation .