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Transl[iter]ating Dubai’s linguistic landscape: a bilingual translation perspective between English and Arabic against a backdrop of globalisation

  • Chonglong Gu

    Chonglong Gu (PhD Manchester; MA Leeds; BA; FHEA; PgCAP Liverpool) is currently an assistant professor in translation and interpreting at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, after serving as lecturer and founding programme director of MA Chinese-English Translation and Interpreting at the University of Liverpool, Merseyside, UK. As an interdisciplinary and socially engaged researcher, his scholarly interests chiefly reside in CDA/PDA, corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, English language teaching, sociolinguistics, linguistic landscape, world Englishes, multilingual crisis and disaster communication, translation and interpreting studies, media and communication, and Chinese studies. His recent academic writings since 2018/2019 have appeared in major international peer-reviewed SSCI-indexed journals such as Critical Discourse Studies, Discourse, Context, and Media, Language and Intercultural Communication, Discourse Studies, Journal of Pragmatics, Perspectives, International Journal of Multilingualism, Target, Linguistica Antverpiensia, Frontiers in Psychology, The Translator, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Translation and Interpreting Studies, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and various book chapters.

     EMAIL logo     und Ali Almanna

    Ali Almanna obtained his PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Durham in the UK and is currently Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar, where he teaches and supervises MA and PhD students. In addition to numerous articles published in peer reviewed journals, he is the author, (co-)editor and translator of several publications, including The Routledge Course in Translation Annotation (2016), Semantics for Translation Students (2016), The Nuts and Bolts of Arabic-English Translation (2018), The Arabic-English Translator as Photographer (2019), Reframing Realities through Translation (2020), and Translation as a Set of Frames (2021). He is also the series editor of Routledge Studies in Arabic Translation.
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 28. April 2023
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Applied Linguistics Review
Aus der Zeitschrift Applied Linguistics Review Band 15 Heft 5

Abstract

As a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary enquiry, linguistic landscape (LL) research can shed light on the sociopolitical, cultural and demographical realities of a particular locale. However, LL research has seldom explored major international cities from a translation and contrastive perspective. Drawing on a corpus containing 450 photographs (e.g. shop fronts and public signs), this study investigates the multilingual landscape involving the Arabic-English pair in Dubai, an international hub representing a vivid case of micro-cosmopolitanism and superdiversity in the 21st century. An examination of the bilingual and translation practices enacted on Dubai’s LL points to a ubiquitous phenomenon that the Arabic information is often not authentic Arabic but transliterations from English (pseudo Arabic in disguise). Such use of transliteration privileges the phonetic transference of sounds, at the expense of meaning and function. The prevalent use of transliteration as a ‘go-to’ strategy is interesting, considering the obvious existence of pure Arabic equivalents. To provide some ethnographic context for the analysis, 10 people in Dubai were interviewed (Arabic speakers from different Arab countries) to establish whether the transliterated Arabic can be understood and the possible rationale behind this interesting linguistic decision. Such symbolic and decorative use of Arabic reflects Dubai’s global city status with immigrants significantly outnumbering the indigenous Arabic-speaking natives. The widespread aesthetic use of ‘Arabised English’ points to the influence of English in a globalised world. Some tentative reasons are provided to explain the phenomenon.

Keywords: Arabised English; Dubai; micro-cosmopolitanism; multilingual landscape; superdiversity; translation
Corresponding author: Chonglong Gu, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, E-mail:

Funding source: Partially supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Start-up Fund and partially by the University of Liverpool

About the authors

Chonglong Gu

Chonglong Gu (PhD Manchester; MA Leeds; BA; FHEA; PgCAP Liverpool) is currently an assistant professor in translation and interpreting at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, after serving as lecturer and founding programme director of MA Chinese-English Translation and Interpreting at the University of Liverpool, Merseyside, UK. As an interdisciplinary and socially engaged researcher, his scholarly interests chiefly reside in CDA/PDA, corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, English language teaching, sociolinguistics, linguistic landscape, world Englishes, multilingual crisis and disaster communication, translation and interpreting studies, media and communication, and Chinese studies. His recent academic writings since 2018/2019 have appeared in major international peer-reviewed SSCI-indexed journals such as Critical Discourse Studies, Discourse, Context, and Media, Language and Intercultural Communication, Discourse Studies, Journal of Pragmatics, Perspectives, International Journal of Multilingualism, Target, Linguistica Antverpiensia, Frontiers in Psychology, The Translator, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Translation and Interpreting Studies, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and various book chapters.

Ali Almanna

Ali Almanna obtained his PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Durham in the UK and is currently Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar, where he teaches and supervises MA and PhD students. In addition to numerous articles published in peer reviewed journals, he is the author, (co-)editor and translator of several publications, including The Routledge Course in Translation Annotation (2016), Semantics for Translation Students (2016), The Nuts and Bolts of Arabic-English Translation (2018), The Arabic-English Translator as Photographer (2019), Reframing Realities through Translation (2020), and Translation as a Set of Frames (2021). He is also the series editor of Routledge Studies in Arabic Translation.

  1. Funding: This study has been funded partially by the University of Liverpool and partially by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Start-up fund).

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Received: 2022-07-12
Accepted: 2023-02-02
Published Online: 2023-04-28
Published in Print: 2024-09-25

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2022-0091
Schlagwörter für diesen Artikel
Arabised English; Dubai; micro-cosmopolitanism; multilingual landscape; superdiversity; translation

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Special Issue: The Yellow Peril or the Model Minority? Racialized identities and discourses of Asian Americans and Asian Canadians; Guest Editor: Christian Chun
  3. Research Articles
  4. Paradoxes of the Canadian mosaic: “being, feeling and doing Canadian”
  5. The Asian American teaching method? An overview of language education, social justice issues, and challenging ‘Oppressed’ versus ‘Model’ minority binary discourse
  6. Life and work between home and “homeland”: a narrative inquiry of transnational Chinese adoptees’ identity negotiations across time and space
  7. I ain’t your f*cking Model Minority! Indexical orders of ‘Asianness’, class, and heteronormative masculinity
  8. Special Issue: Assessment and Creativity through a Translingual Lens; Guest Editors: Lavinia Hirsu, Marta Nitecka Barche and Dobrochna Futro
  9. Editorials
  10. Assessment and creativity through a translingual lens: introduction
  11. Assessment and creativity through a translingual lens: transdisciplinary insights
  12. Creative translanguaging in formative assessment: Chinese teachers’ perceptions and practices in the primary EFL classroom
  13. Creativity, criticality and translanguaging in assessment design: perspectives from Bangladeshi higher education
  14. Integrating translanguaging into assessment: students’ responses and perceptions
  15. Research Articles
  16. Investigation of factors underlying foreign language classroom anxiety in Chinese university English majors
  17. Why can’t I teach English? A case study of the racialized experiences of a female Ugandan teacher of English in an EFL context
  18. Primary-concern solicitation in Chinese medical encounters
  19. The relationships between young FL learners’ classroom emotions (anxiety, boredom, & enjoyment), engagement, and FL proficiency
  20. Visualising the language practices of lower secondary students: outlines for practice-based models of multilingualism
  21. Observing a teacher’s interactional competence in an ESOL classroom: a translanguaging perspective
  22. Foreign language teacher grit: scale development and examining the relations with emotions and burnout using relative weight analysis
  23. Vocabulary learning in a foreign language: multimedia input, sentence-writing task, and their combination
  24. The predictive effects of reading speed and positive affect on first and second language incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading an authentic novel
  25. The effects of cultural and educational background on students’ use of language learning strategies in CFL learning
  26. Transl[iter]ating Dubai’s linguistic landscape: a bilingual translation perspective between English and Arabic against a backdrop of globalisation
  27. Exploring Tibetan residents’ everyday language practices in Danba county, Southwest China: a case study
  28. The mechanism for the positive effect of foreign language peace of mind in the Chinese EFL context: a moderated mediation model based on learners’ individual resources
  29. A latent profile analysis of L2 writing emotions and their relations to writing buoyancy, motivation and proficiency
  30. “Part of me is teaching English”: probing the language-related teaching practices of an English-medium instruction (EMI) teacher
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