Revisiting Andalusian History: Sociocultural Influences on the (Re)translation of Early Arab Narratives
Abstract
This paper explores the Retranslation Hypothesis as a sociocultural activity. It investigates how the act of retranslation can be motivated by multiple sociocultural factors through analysing the two English translations of the Arabic historical chronicle Tarikh Iftitah al-Andalus by Ibn al-Qutiya from a sociocultural perspective. Using Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory (2005), the present study scrutinises the textual constituents of the two English translations to highlight how evaluative positions are rendered differently in the two English target texts, in addition to discerning the possible sociocultural factors influencing the retranslation process. The results reveal that the English retranslation (target text 2) has entailed several alterations on the textual level when dealing with representations of early Arab Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula through creating significant shifts in appraisal, which have resulted in either weakening or intensifying the original evaluative position in order to provide a representation that would align with the sociocultural expectations of the target audience.
Keywords: Retranslation; Appraisal theory; Ibn al-Qutiya; al-Andalus; Sociocultural factors
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