AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

This thesis investigates the main features of professional translations of Islamic banking terms from Arabic to English and of translations of financial terms in English-Arabic dictionaries. The focus of the study is an analysis of three different translations (by Hamilton, Baintner and Nyazee) of the well-known Hanafi text Al-Hidāyah by Al-Marghinani, fatwas translated by Talal DeLorenzo in A Compendium of Legal Opinions on the Operation of Islamic Banks and the Saudi official fatwa website. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the thesis. Chapter 2 provides an overview of Islamic banking. Chapter 3 provides an account of the semantic principles which are used to investigate the terms under investigation. Chapter 4 examines Islamic financial terminology in the translations of Hamilton, Baintner, Nyazee, DeLorenzo and the Saudi official fatwa website, in order to ascertain: (i) what translation techniques are used by these translators; (ii) how frequently each of these translation techniques are used; and (iii) how acceptable each of these translation techniques is on average. In Chapter 5, the quantitative aspect of the analysis of Islamic financial terminology is developed, by seeking via a questionnaire the opinion of three groups of the translations of Hamilton, Baintner, Nyazee, and DeLorenzo in respect of (i) acceptability, (ii) comprehensibility. These groups are: 1. Arab professional translators (from Saudi Arabia), 2. Arab student translators (from Saudi Arabia), and 3. British student translators. The questionnaire analysed in Chapter 5 also asks the three groups of respondents, in cases where they deem translations to be unacceptable, to identify what translation technique(s) they find unacceptable. The results deriving from this analysis in Chapter 5 are compared with the acceptability judgements for individual translation techniques produced in Chapter 4, to provide a more detailed and insightful account of what translators find unacceptable in the translation of technical Arabic financial terms into English. Chapter 6 considers dictionaries of banking terms, assessing the degree of concordance between the subjects of the sample and translators on the one hand, and the financial term translations given in dictionaries, on the other. A short questionnaire was distributed to a group of qualified translators to evaluate the success of the translations of the terms identified in the texts. Chapter 7 provides a conclusion to the current work, and recommendations for future research.