Translating irony in political commentary texts from english into arabic

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This paper investigates strategies for the translation of irony in English editorials and feature articles into Arabic. It explores an area that has not been adequately tackled in a linguistic framework either on the individual language analysis level or the translation level.The plan to achieve this consists of five steps: (1) describing lexical, grammatical and rhetorical devices of irony from Arabic and English editorials and feature articles, written in Australia on identical political topics and at the same period; (2) describing the linguistic exponents of the rhetorical devices of irony in English and Arabic; (3) explaining the relation between ironic devices and coherence and text structure; (4) conducting a contrastive analysis based on the findings; and (5) using the findings to suggest strategies for the translation of irony. Several linguistic disciplines and sub-disciplines are invoked for the explanation of the concept of irony, namely, stylistics, discourse, sociolinguistics, behavioural linguistics and psycholinguistics, considering that irony pertains to a 'discourse semantic' field (Van Dijk 1977).