Translating irony in political commentary texts from English into Arabic

This paper investigates strategies for the translation of irony in English editorials and feature articles into Arabic. It explores an area that has not been adequately tackled in a linguistic framework either on the individual language analysis level or the translation level. The plan to achieve this consists of five steps: (1) describing lexical, grammatical and rhetorical devices of irony from Arabic and English editorials and feature articles, written in Australia on identical political topics and at the same period; (2) describing the linguistic exponents of the rhetorical devices of irony in English and Arabic; (3) explaining the relation between ironic devices and coherence and text structure; (4) conducting a contrastive analysis based on the findings; and (5) using the findings to suggest strategies for the translation of irony. Several linguistic disciplines and sub-disciplines are invoked for the explanation of the concept of irony, namely, stylistics, discourse, sociolinguistics, behavioural linguistics and psycholinguistics, considering that irony pertains to a 'discourse semantic' field (Van Dijk 1977).