National songs in Jordan : a sociolinguistic and translational analysis

incl. ref.

Songs of all types as a distinct artistic genre can be very informative means of understanding the cultural and social construct of a given society. Like poetry, especially the oral form, which heavily relies on colloquialism, as is the case within a Jordanian context, songs can bear cultural, and historical allusions, genealogy, and mythology, in some cultures to be performed on related contemporary occasions. The present study is an attempt to analyze the social, cultural and historic allusions, linguistically interwoven in national and patriotic songs to reflect a massive feeling as the content of an artistic aspect of the ordinary people's everyday life. Due to cultural and social distinctiveness, as mainly expressed in colloquial Arabic expressions, such type of songs can create gaps hard to bridge in translation. Therefore, the study tries to shed light into those problems posed in translating national songs, which are richly loaded with colloquial expressions, to a target audience.