Categorizing Declarative Speech Acts in English – Arabic Political Translation: A Pragmatic Study

Abstract

Declarative speech acts are those acts that affect immediate changes in the world via their utterance. The specification of declarative speech acts raises problematic area as not all declarative utterances serve out performatively. The specificity of pragmatic conditions of declarative acts lead to another problem in that setting out the same function and affecting the same immediate change would not similarly be lexicalized in the two different natural languages. Therefore, declarative speech acts will pose difficulties for translators if they are unaware of categorizing their pragmatic conditions appropriately and integrating their process interpreting with affecting immediate perlocutionary purposively. Accordingly, it aims at: 1) setting some felicity conditions for determining sensibly whether the specified declarative expressions serve out performatively as genuine declarative acts or not. 2-Examining whether English declarative acts are perceived performatively in Arabic. 3- Exercising to what extents do the translators transfer declarative intentioned effects. and 4- Proposing certain pragmatic parameters for interpreting situational bounded expressions and providing some remedies for mistranslated verbs. The objective of the study is fairly confined to a number of declarative acts selected from dialogues, comments, statements and debates of English TV (e.g. Al-Jazeera TV, BBC, among many others). The main result shows that declarative acts are performatively influenced by contextual nature. The result also shows that many declarative expressions can alternatively name different illocutionary act. From functional perspective, the perception of English declarative acts is different from the Arabic one. Thus, the most accurate rendering of declarations is based on the correspondence between perception and immediate perloctionary affects.