This interdisciplinary study examines whether instances, variants, and translations of the human rights term كرامة (karāma, 'dignity') in the Leeds Parallel Corpus of Arabic-English Constitutions imply a shared understanding of the term from source to target text (i.e. from Arabic to English). Our approach combines quantitative and qualitative techniques from Corpus Linguistics and Arabic legal translation and contributes to theory and practice in the emerging field of computer-assisted legal linguistics and translation. Our research methodology includes: specification of morphological variants of كرامة in the Arabic corpus; close scrutiny of parallel concordance lines; and analysis of the semantic prosody of target terms through collocation discovery. In total, we identify 65 instances of كرامة (or one of its variants) in the Arabic data, where raw frequency of the term is highest in the constitutions of Egypt and Sudan, and missing in the constitution of Palestine. We find that while the indefinite noun كرامة is always translated as ‘dignity’ in English, the definite form (الكرامة, al-karāma) is often rendered via a qualifying adjective plus the word 'treatment'. We also find that the combination of الكرامة and negation leads to qualification of ‘treatment’ with notions of humiliation and cruelty. This is further evidenced via collocation discovery over the Arabic and English sub-corpora of 19 constitutions. This suggests a common understanding of كرامة and dignity as an inviolable human right across these different languages and cultures, fostered perhaps by the theological significance of these terms.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)