Doctoral Thesis: Explication and Implication in Arabic-English Translation of Institutional Academic Correspondence
Within the context of university communication, the choice of translation strategies can significantly impact the clarity and effectiveness of academic correspondence. This study investigates the role of explicitation and implicitation in translating from English (source language) to Arabic (target language). We explore how these strategies manifest in institutional academic correspondence (circulars and memos) and determine which strategy is more prevalent. Skopos theory serves as the theoretical framework for this research. The study analyzed a corpus of 300 academic documents issued by the University of Sharjah between 2014 and 2024. An extended version of Klaudy's (2009) classification model is employed to identify instances of explication and implication across various linguistic levels (syntactic, semantic, stylistic, textual, and pragmatic). Our findings reveal a preference for implication in the English source texts compared to the Arabic translations. Furthermore, the analysis identified diverse manifestations of both strategies across different linguistic levels. The study concludes that explication and implication are both utilized in academic correspondence translation, but with varying frequencies.
