Illocutionary Act and Communication with Reference to Translation

Abstract

No doubt speech act theory received a lot of attention by philosophers, pragmatists and leading figures of speech act theory as well as theorists of translation. Among these theorists are Austin (1962) and Searle (1969). However, to the best of our knowledge no work concerning “understanding conversation through speech acts and translation was carried out. This paper is an attempt to abridge that gap. It is a well-known fact that languages which belong to different families are different syntactically,  , and stylistically. This means that the differences are due to language specific features. Hence comes the problem of translating communicative speech acts from English into Arabic. This variation between both languages and structures of speech acts in
English and Arabic results in misunderstanding the communication between native speakers of English and Arabic. Consequently, it will have its own impact on the process of communication between two parties and thus on the process of translation. This paper aims at studying some conversations which were presented by British Broadcasting Corporation ( BBC ). The conversation consists of 7 conversational exchanges with their renderings by BBC. These exchanges were studied and analyzed in terms of comprehensive tables, which involve Source Language (SL), Target language (TL) and different categories of speech acts such as assertives, directives, commissives , expressives as well as declarations. The main findings of this paper are: (1) the conversations in question contain different types of speech act categories, (2) these categories can be translated into Arabic despite cultural and structural divergences between English and Arabic.