The Cohesive Function of the Reference in the Business and Economic Language:A Case of English-Arabic Translated Texts

Abstract

Reference as a cohesive device is tackled differently between languages that descend from different families. Reference in English is assumed to be more cohesive than Arabic in the literary texts as argued by Moindjie (2015) The corpus in this study is collected from business and economic texts drawn from World Bank Blogs and follows Halliday and Hassan’s (1976) cohesion analysis scheme where reference  plays a major role. The study is an attempt to explore the reference behavior qualitatively in this specific genre and an examination of the postulation that reference depends on particular language peculiarities rather than translators’ choices. It reveals that the business and economic genre shows a similar behavior of reference to the literary genre and that the same factors affect the three types of reference, namely, personal, demonstrative, and comparative reference. These factors are syndeton, asyndeton, hypotaxis, concreteness and abstractness and other interchangeable items in addition to the oblique procedures, including transposition and modulation, where systematic equivalence cannot be found in the translation.