Umed Muhammad Ameen

Centre for Creative Writing, Translation and Publishing, Department of Journalism

E: Umed.muhammad-ameen.1@city.ac.uk

Thesis title: Lexical Choices in Translating Political Articles from English into Sorani Kurdish

Supervisors: ‏Dr Karen Seago

Course start date and mode of study:
1/10/2011 -  Full-time

Summary of current doctoral research

Umed's thesis examines a corpus of English political articles and their translations into Sorani Kurdish. It focuses on the translators' lexical choices in order to show how the translated political articles are shaped and why they are shaped in the way they are in the target culture and explain the translators' behaviour in making lexical choices.

With regard to its methodology, the study follows Toury's (1995) three-phase methodology and employs concepts and frameworks from equivalence-based theories, functionalist approaches, Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), text-linguistic approaches, cultural approaches, Corpus-based translation studies, Baker's (2006) narrative theory and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The study also takes the translators' lexical choices as the unit of comparison and analysis between the English political articles and their translations into Sorani Kurdish.

In order to reach its aims, the study attempts to identify individual, group and collective regularities in the translators' behaviour, formulate generalizations based on these regularities and interpreting the regularities in terms of norms. It also investigates the translators' lexical choices to analyse the effects of these choices on the TTs. Further, it considers the factors which can explain the translators' decisions with regard to making lexical choices.

Research interests

• Translation Studies
• Discourse Analysis

Higher education background and previous experience

• MA in Bilingual Translation, 2008, University of Westminster, London, UK
• Bachelor's degree in English Language and Literature, 2003, University of Sulaimani, Sulaimani, Iraq.

Teaching

Assistant lecturer at English Language Department, University of Sulaimani, Sulaimani, Iraq (2009 - to present).