The Linguist

12 The Linguist Vol/65 No/3 ciol.org.uk/thelinguist FEATURES Eyhab Baden Eddin explores Arabic and English synonyms, and asks what happens when there's a mismatch relation to space and time. In the original passage about Evin Prison, for example, Mahvash uses the second-person singular to bring 'you', the reader, directly into the prison with her. But the prison she takes 'you' into is like a Piranesi sketch, with stairs going up and ending in midair, and corridors twisting and turning in on each other like a Mobius strip. This surreal world was also weirdly appropriate, because imprisonment for Mahvash is always linked to the inner as well as the outer world. She had not intended to create this effect; indeed, she thought she had written a very precise description of Evin. It was only when I questioned her about which side of the corridor the doors were on, or where exactly the stairs led to, that she realised that what she had in her mind had not quite succeeded in reaching the page! Once we pinned down the details, the challenge was to convey the psychological prison to the English reader as well. A spatial description was not enough, so I added Mahvash's commentaries and meditative passages from other parts of the memoir in order to lead the reader step by step from the outer world to an inner one. When I was talking to Mahvash about some of these decisions during our rare Skype conversations before her arrest, she laughed and said: "When you finish, we will translate this whole book back into Persian!" Communication has been difficult since then. But I have often had the feeling that Mahvash's text was talking to us. It happened with the title. She didn't choose it, but after it came to me, with its wonderful affirmative resonance, I found more than 200 references to doors in the text. The book chose its own title! F uelled by centuries of borrowing, innovation and contact with other languages, English has a vast array of synonyms that pose both opportunities and challenges for translators. When English meets a richly nuanced language like Arabic, the task of identifying semantic equivalents is complex, requiring a deep understanding of cultural and contextual underpinnings on both sides. Translators often find themselves caught between the abundance of English synonyms and the intricate specificity of Arabic terms, making the quest for accurate equivalence both an art and a science. This is especially evident in legal English, where couplings such as 'null and void', 'cease and desist' and 'terms and conditions' reduce ambiguity, emphasise the seriousness of the action or concept and reflect a tradition of legal thoroughness. Historically, many of these pairings arose from the coexistence of multiple legal traditions – primarily Latin, French and Old English – used together to ensure understanding across linguistic divides. This speaks to one of the functions of synonyms more generally: allowing for precision in communication, as each word has a slightly different shade of meaning or tone. Synonymy is a feature of language that is particularly dependent on the needs of its speakers. Bryson introduces many interesting examples in English, 1 including 'kingly', 'royal' and 'regal' – near-synonyms which entered the language through Old English, French and Latin respectively. As per Cruse, 2 it is important to distinguish between absolute synonymy, where the contextual relations are identical (which is rare), and near-synonymy. For the translator, this is more than a theoretical distinction. Apparently synonymous pairs often reveal differences once they are placed in an actual sentence. For example, 'big' and 'large' overlap in meaning, yet a big mistake is much more natural than a large one. In my view, this is precisely where linguistic knowledge must be complemented by sensitivity to usage. Cruse treats most everyday synonyms as forms of near-synonymy. This distinction is particularly significant for English-Arabic translation because apparent equivalents should not automatically be treated as semantically identical. A translator must assess whether the contextual restrictions and finer semantic features of the words correspond. In this sense, synonymy is better understood as a continuum of semantic proximity than as a straightforward relation of interchangeability. Word analysis One important way of analysing words and synonyms is componential analysis (CA), which breaks down the meaning of words into their smallest meaningful components in terms of a set of binary features, which are either present or absent. According to Nida, CA is part of the first stage of the translation process, used to identify the kernels underlying the source text. 3 Words that share the same set of componential features are considered semantically equivalent. For example, 'run', SAME DIFFERENCE Before her arrest, she laughed: "When you finish, we will translate this whole book back into Persian!"

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