Arabicization and Terminology with Reference to Social Media Terms

This study addresses the prevalence of English terminology in published Arabic documentation on social media. Although the problem of using English terms in translation instead of existing native ones has been addressed in general by researchers around the world, the attitude of the translators as professionals to this phenomenon in Qatar has not received a detailed study. This study examines the prevalence of English social media terms in the Arab world and their use by aspiring and professional translators. It also explores the benefits and drawbacks of linguistic borrowing as identified by the translators; and investigates whether translators consider any means of resisting linguistic borrowing and prioritizing Arabic. This research is descriptive, comparative and analytical in nature. It is both qualitative and quantitative. To validate the problem, the researcher analyzed articles published by Al-Jazeera in 2016-2018 that refer to the use of social media in diplomacy. To investigate whether the translators recognize the phenomenon of borrowing, the researcher proposes to use a survey. This survey used multiple choice questions. It targeted 20 aspiring translators from Qatar. It offered 15 English social media terms used in discourse in 15 sentences. For each sentence, the author provided three different translations and asked the translators to rate them and offer their own rendition. After collecting all the answers online, the author analyzed data using the Skopos Theory and the borrowing approach. The results confirm that there is a prevalence of English terms in translating into Arabic. It also shows what measures the translators used to render the English social media terms and it raises awareness of borrowing English terms. The research concludes that although translators aware of trans-lingual borrowing, they tend to use it while rendering some terms and is due to various reasons among which is that some Arabic equivalents are too long or there is a disagreement among Arabic speakers to use specific equivalents to English terms.