Asir before World War I : Ideological Representations of the Local Tribes and Translational Shifts

This paper aims to examine the representation of Asiri people in Asir before World War I (Cornwallis 1976), a historical British travel writing book, and its respective Arabic translation. Following Toury’s (1995) descriptive approach and van Leuven-Zwart’s (1989) model of shift analysis, I investigate the impact of particular sociocultural factors on the image construction process in terms of Asiris’ personal and physical characteristics, ethnic heritage, and traditional values and practices. Then, I explore the impact of these shifts on the macro level of meaning and overall representation of people and traditions of Asir. The study finds the representation of the local people in the book is pragmatic and strictly goes in line with the colonial agenda and perspectives. Furthermore, the translation shows frequent patterns of modification, mutation shifts and omissions related to the representation and depiction of the local people (individuals and groups) reported in the original text.


Introduction
In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, in particular, British travellers traditionally documented their travels around the globe and provided readers and researchers back in England with unique information on exotic far-away lands, new peoples, and unfamiliar cultures. Due to the scarcity of native scholarship and near absence of archival materials, their writings became primary historical references about the people of the land (Reilly 2015), and these writings held a position of prestige in the literatures of the world at the time as they were seen as bearing witness to encounters with those new people and cultures across historical, social, geographical, and ethnic divides (Clarke 2018). According to Pratt (2007), travel writing gave the European reading public a sense of ownership, entitlement, and familiarity with respect to the distant 2 International Journal of Emerging Multidisciplinaries parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized; hence the popularity of travel books at that time.
Travel writing, then, depends on the authority of the writer who, as the only (reliable) witness, attempts to persuade readers of the authenticity of the facts reported in their account. In addition to this, English travel literature, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became clearly identified with the interests and objectives of European powers, who, at the time, wished to bring the non-European world into a position where it could be influenced, exploited and, in some cases, directly controlled. Therefore, although the historical records European travellers left behind are quite valuable in terms of novelty of information, the travellers' self-identification as morally and intellectually superior explorers leads to representations influenced by their egocentric assumptions and ideologies, rather than the provision of information about the 'reality' of the situation.
Today, more and more studies are exploring the connection between travel and translation, many of which focus on the way in which both practices are used to construct images of the 'Other'. In fact, according to Dominte (2016), the traveller and the translator have both played, for a long time, the historical role of intermediary between two spaces/cultures. Both the translator and the traveller share the ambiguous status of, on the one hand, the privileged witness of diversity, and, on the other hand, a potential liar or even double agent; both, as a result, face questions related to faithfulness and objectivity, transparency, and visibility.
Moreover, both travellers and translators, and their products, are deeply linked to ideology and power (Polezzi Thus, in exploring the relationship between travel and translation, we need to be aware that both practices are frequently seen as metaphors of mobility and flexibility and that both practices are closely linked to representation and ideology. However, research on such substantial travel accounts and their translations seems to be neglected in the field of translation studies. The aim of this paper, thus, is to shed some light on the representation of Asiri people in one of the Earliest British travel books, Asir before World War I (Cornwallis 1976), and its Arabic translation. It is an investigation into the impact of some sociocultural factors on the image construction process related to personal Asir before World War I 3 and physical characteristics, ethnic heritage, and traditional values and practices related to these natives. The paper is interdisciplinary in that it addresses a translational issue (semantic shifts), utilizing cultural constituents (representation and ideology).
Thus, the present paper attempts to address three questions: 1. How did the British traveller represent Asiri people in the selected travel book? 2. How do the Arabic translations of the British travel book reflect the ST's representation of Asiri people and their traditions?
3. What is the impact of shift patterns on the macro-structural level and thus the overall representation of Asiri people?
The organization of this article is as follows. Section 2 reviews the previous studies on travel writing. Section 3 introduces the methodology of the current study. In section 4, I provide a background of the necessary theoretical concepts adopted in the study, and the analysis of the data will follow in section 5. Section 6 summarizes the conclusions of the study.

Previous Studies
Salama-Carr (2007) examines the representation and translation strategies used to construct national identity in International Journal of Emerging Multidisciplinaries explores the lexical items used by Doughty to describe desert Arabs (Bedouins). She examines these lexical choices in light of two themes relevant to the discourse of Orientalism according to her research premise: the first is the underlying cultural superiority of the West and the other is 'the interdependence' of texts describing the people of Arabia. As such, her paper supports the premise that the label 'discourse of Orientalism' can comprise even seemingly neutral descriptions of people of Arabia, and those existing representations of Bedouins are a product of an accumulated body of work rather than from one specific text (Alzahrani 2018).
Nevertheless, Azahrani's (2018) work represents a rare study in the field of translation studies that focus on travel writing, historical or recent, and representation in related to the Arabia and its inhabitants. Other research on this subject is, unfortunately, absent and was thus a significant motivation for conducting this study, as it will fill an important research gap in the field.

Data
The data of this study are taken from Asir before World War I (Cornwallis 1976

Method
This study implements an empirical and analytical methodology with elements drawn mainly from Toury's (1995) descriptive approach and van Leuven-Zwart's (1989) model of shifts analysis. The first stage of analysis involves a comparative description of extracts representing significant and radical cases of shifts, and it examines the representation constructed in the original text within its socio-ideological context and how the Arabic translation reflects/reconstructs this representation.
The second stage of analysis is a quantitative inspection of shifts to identify frequent patterns. Using both quantitative and qualitative findings, the third stage of analysis discovers the impact of the micro-level shifts on the macro-structural level of meaning and the overall representation in each book. By doing so, patterns of significant and radical semantic shifts in translation are determined and their impact on the overall representation is revealed.
Due to the historical value of the information in the corpus at hand, I consider translation to be concerned with semantics more than structure. Therefore, following Vinay and Darbelnet (in Hatim and Munday 2004), I consider a 'lexicological unit' or a 'unit of thought' to be a translation unit, i.e. a word or group of words expressing a single description (representation) related to people is considered to be a translation unit.
The method of analysis followed in this article is inspired by the comparative part of van Leuven-Zwart's (1989) shifts analysis model, which involves a thorough and detailed comparison of ST and TT and a classification of all micro-structural shifts as well as Toury's (1995) method of describing the translation phenomena/translation products within their sociocultural context. The analysis focuses on micro-level shifts that represent semantic differences between the source text and the translation, with reference to three categories: modification shifts, mutation shifts, and shifts beyond the sentence level (deletion of paragraphs). All extracts analysed in this part were obtained from the travel book: Asir before World War I (Cornwallis 1976).

Representation
A substantial and complex notion in language and culture, representation has been defined in many ways.
According to the cultural theorist Hall (1997: 15) representation is a process of "giving meaning to" or "making sense of" objects, people or events through the use of language, attaching a deeper and more semiotic sense to 6 International Journal of Emerging Multidisciplinaries the term. He defines the notion of cultural representation as "producing meaning and exchanging it between cultures by the use of language, signs or images which represent things" or "the production of the meaning of the concepts in our minds through language" (Hall 1997: 17). Culture, according to Hall's definitions, denotes "whatever is distinctive about 'the way of life' of a people" or the sum of a society's ideas and practices, as represented in their works of literature, music, philosophy, or any other widely distributed forms (Hall 1997: 2).
Thus, the term 'representation', in this current paper, indicates the process of producing particular meanings about particular people and/or their traditions, with the purpose of portraying a certain image to readers in a specific manner.

The Role of Ideology
Representation is not a transparent process of representing events and entities objectively, as there is always "a mediating effect whereby an event is filtered through interpretive frameworks and acquires ideological significance" (Poole 2009: 23). Ideology is seen as "an organization of opinions, attitudes, and valuesa way of thinking -about man and society" (Adorno et al.1950: 2). The term ideology is used in this study to denote a set of assumptions, beliefs, and value-systems adopted by a traveller/author or a translator/editor when producing a text concerning the people of Arabia and their particular traditions.

Translation Shifts
Another important aspect of translation studies is the analysis of translational shifts. The current study adopts van Leuven-Zwart (1989, 1990 shift analysis model. Drawing on categories proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958,1995) and Levy (1969), and applying them to the descriptive analysis of translation, van Leuven-Zwart's model is distinctive and more thorough than previous ones. The model presents a study in which linguistic and textual analyses are both in use, and proposes a bottom-up procedure that compares the original text with its translation by identifying common ground between them, while placing both texts on an equal footing (Hermans 1999). The main aim of this model is "to describe and catalogue 'shifts' in translation and to deduce from these, the translator's underlying strategy or norm" (Hermans 1999: 58).
In this model, van Leuven-Zwart makes a clear distinction between micro-structural shifts, which are shifts at the textual level, and macro-structural shifts, which represent the effects of micro-structural shifts at the broader level of a text's discourse. The model includes two categories, comparative and descriptive, in order to build a systematic framework of comparison within and above sentence level (Munday 2001). The comparative category involves a thorough and detailed comparison of the ST and the TT and a classification of all micro-structural shifts (van Leuven-Zwart 1989). These shifts, which can be found in sentences, clauses, and phrases, are identified by comparing comprehensible textual units in the ST and TT. These are called 'transemes'. Transemes, in this Asir before World War I 7 model, are divided into two kinds: the state of affairs transeme and the satellite transeme. Van Leuven-Zwart (1989: 156) states that the state of affairs transeme "consists of a predicatea lexical verb or a copulaand its arguments", whereas the satellite transeme "lacks a predicate and might be described as an adverbial specification or amplification of the state of affairs transeme". This model also introduced the concept of the "architranseme" (ATR), which is defined as "the common denominator" that includes the similarities and/or dissimilarities refers to the relationships between writer and reader or speaker and hearer of the text; the ideational, which refers to the way textual information is presented to the reader; and the textual, which refers to how a text's information is organized in language (van Leuven-Zwart 1989).

Data Analysis
In this section, I provide a comparative and descriptive qualitative analysis of some of the extracts comprising the primary corpus for this study.

Modification Shifts
A modification shift indicates a change in the meaning of the source text by adding something new to it, taking something out of it, or substituting part/s of it in translation. Itt results in a noticeably significant difference in meaning between the translation and the information that the ST provides, while maintaining the core elements from the source in the translation.
The following is an example of modification shift via addition in a translation of a generalized description of an entire tribe's characteristics, extracted from the travel book Asir before World War I (Cornwallis 1976 In the translation, the word "dislike" is translated by two words, "hate" and "contempt", both of which generate a stronger meaning than that of the ST. Similarly, the meaning "restraint" is emphasized through the addition of lexis in the phrase "restraint and restriction of freedom". Although the impact of such additions in translation might not be very significant for the core meaning of the ST, it gives an indication of the occurrence of addition in the translation of this book compared to other shifts, such as that of recurrent omission. A similar practice of addition is seen occasionally in the translation. In the following unit, the ST concerns some nomadic clans in Asir. These specific clans traditionally viewed sheep-and camel-raising, horse-breeding, hunting, and raiding as honourable occupations worthy of an independent and free man, but never agriculture, craft, or trade (Hitti 1937). In the Arabic translation, the word "dignity" is translated by two words: "dignity" and Here, the text describes Beni Bishr, a section of the Qahtan tribes of Arabia, which are subdivided into several settled and nomadic clans. The omission -in this case the words "intractable" and "marriage"is indicated in the translation by ellipsis. More importantly, a rather interesting case of shift via significant substitution of meaning is seen in in the change of the ST terms "prosperous" and "pagans". The ST "prosperous" is changed to "courageous" in the TT, and "pagans" is changed to "patriotic". The term 'patriotic' generally indicates loyalty and devotion to one's country. Using the term in a historical text when describing a nomadic group during the very early stages of the establishment of the modern Arabian state might be very confusing to the translation reader, especially people from that specific region. including prominent tribesmen and chiefs. One of these Asiri figures is the person described above, Faraj Ibn Said. The man is reported to be tall and fair and the traveller/author explains, in parenthesis, that the ethnicity of his mother is Circassian. In the translation, however, this explanation of the mother's origin is omitted. The reference to the ethnic background of Faraj's wife, who is also Circassian, in the same sentence, is maintained.
Although information on the man's background is omitted in the translation, this example is not considered a case of mutation shift as the omission here does not affect the core message of the unit and the omitted phrase is in fact inserted in parenthesis in the ST. Also, a word or phrase inserted into a passage that is grammatically complete without it usually indicates further explanation or afterthought, rather than being part of the core message.
A reference to the "Sudanese" roots of another tribe in Asir, Beni Shaibah, in the same book, includes modification through omission, also signalled by an ellipsis. In this case, oddly, the ST meaning "have been emancipated" is omitted and replaced by an ellipsis rather than the claimed ethnicity itself, "Sudanese": The tribe is mixed, the Sheiks and chief families being Arabs, the rest Sudanese who have been emancipated for many generations. This is from the appendix of this book, which comprises a list of tribal chiefs, with some brief and general information about each one of them. The ST extract above is the only description we see of a tribal chief named Ali Ibn Khanfour. The man is described as small, pock-marked, and intelligent but unpopular with his tribe. The traveller, moreover, claims, without any further explanation, that Ibn Khanfour lost his faith due to/during his travels to Constantinople. In the Arabic translation, the description of the man is retained as it is, apart from the word "small", which is substituted, oddly, by 'has weak influence'. When it comes to the reference to religion, however, the statement "lost religion in his visits to Constantinople" is omitted entirely and the man's faith is not indicated. This omission, although highly significant with regard to the representation of a person from Asir, is not indicated by ellipsis and does not affect the core message of the ST. This is why it is categorized as modification.
A similar case is related to drinking alcohol, which is known to be forbidden in the Islamic faith, and which is a proscribed activity in Arabian, specifically Asiri, societies, especially at that time in history: ST p.91 Rich and to be reckoned with, but a drunkard and libertine.
TT p.154 ‫حساب‬ ‫له‬ ‫ويحسب‬ ‫ثري‬ BT Rich and to be reckoned with.
Again, the above text is taken from the appendix at the end of Asir before World War I (Cornwallis 1976). It describes Faraj, a chief of a tribe, who is presented as being rich and powerful, but also a "drunkard and libertine".
This last description was omitted in the TT without being indicated in any way. Reading the Arabic translation, a reader is presented with a meaning that is much weaker than that of the original, with no information about Faraj's 'unvirtuous' tendencies, as described by the traveller in the original account.

Mutation Shifts
This The following extract provides a relatively brief description of one of Asir's tribesmen, Abu Alamah, within a list of personalities in the region. Abu Alamah is described as a poor but honest consultant to the region's chief at the time. Other than this statement, no previous or further description of this man's appearance or personal attributes is found within the travel book. The change in the ST meaning here is considerable. In the ST sentence, the main information in the description of Abu Alamah relates to a distinctive birthmark covering one side of the man's face. However, we see that the translation provides entirely different information about this characteristic, as the birth mark is rendered into "a prayer mark". A prayer mark is a rather small dark skin blemish that appears on the forehead of some Muslims due to the friction generated by repeated contact with a prayer mat. Describing a man as having a prayer mark therefore constructs a representation of piety or religious devotion (as in frequent praying). Moreover, the translation assigns a completely new meaning to the sentence through omission of the ST information "covering one side". A person reading this translation, hence, receives an entirely different meaning, in terms of the physical feature described, to that of the original text. They will understand that the described person has only a small dark prayer mark on his forehead and not a large birthmark covering half of his face, as the original text states.
One noticeably recurrent theme in many representations of Asiri tribes is liberty and the longing for freedom and self-determination. The following extract describes Dhuwwi Hassan, a nomadic clan from the tribes of Asir.
The shift is one of mutation because the entire sentence describing the clan is not translated, a frequent practice seen in the translation of this book: ST p.32 They are, however, thoroughly impatient of any control and what little deference they show to anyone is paid to the Idrissi, who are sufficiently far away to appear attractive.

TT Omitted
The traveller explains here, in a generalized manner, how some specific tribes of Bishah (a large agricultural town in the south of Asir) are divided into settlers (palm-and wheat-growers) and nomadsthe former being civilized, the latter 'mostly' "savage". He frequently describes many of the nomads negatively, as having an evil reputation related to their raiding methods and cruelty. To him, they are lawless, although some show loyalty to the Idrissi, the leader of the Idrissid Emirate that controlled minor parts of Asir at the time. Due to this omission, a reader of the Arabic translation of the passage obtains far less information about the Bishah's tribes than is present in the ST, and altogether no information about their political allegiance.

Shifts beyond Sentence Level
The examples in the above sections have highlighted significant and radical instances of modification and mutation, where descriptions of people of Asir are substituted, added, or removed at sentence level in translations.
This section, however, demonstrates a type of shift that affects the meaning of more than one sentence at the same time: deletion of paragraphs. This shift means the removal of a larger lexical portion of the source text, with more than one sentence omitted in the Arabic translation (and a maximum of five). Due to space constraints, other omitted paragraphs cannot be quoted in their entirety here. Instead, representative examples related to this part will be discussed.
In As can be seen in the graph above, 167 cases of modification, mutation, and shifts beyond sentence level were recorded in the Arabic translation in descriptions related to Asiri people and their traditions alone. This is a significant number, especially given the rather small size of this travel book (155 pages). The graph also shows that the vast majority of shifts comprise omission, with 122 cases. This is followed by substitution, and then paragraph deletion, both with far fewer cases, while additions form the smallest group.
From a macro perspective, excessive omissions in the translation not only remove valuable historical information, but they also create ambiguity, rendering many statements incomprehensible in the translated book. In fact, the general reading experience of the translation of Asir before World War I (Cornwallis 1976) is greatly disrupted by omission shifts (marked by ellipses or unmarked). Such interruptions not only detract from the overall meaning, but they also severely impair readability and flow of information. This occurs at the sentence level, as well as affecting general readability of the Arabic book as a whole. Radical substitutions, within mutation shifts, also include cases where the translation completely contradicts the original text, resulting in statements that are simply untrue.
It can be established then, that the impact of micro shifts on the macro-structural level of meaning in the Arabic translation of Asir before World War I (Cornwallis 1976) is primarily related to extreme loss of meaning and disruption of readability. This means that the overall representation of Asiri people and their traditions in the translation is distorted and greatly reduced due to significant and radical semantic shifts.
In a broader historical context, the British traveller claims to provide a valuable pragmatic account, documenting 'for the first time' the 'unexplored' region and its people during the period before World War I (Cornwallis 1976).
However, a lack of investigative research into the region, alongside the traveller's own prejudiced and racist

Conclusion
The representation in the travel document, Asir before World War I (Cornwallis 1976) seems to be purely pragmatic and strictly in line with the colonial agenda and perspectives. In fact, the traveller seems to perceive his journey to Arabia in purely practical terms. In Cornwallis's (1976) account, 'travellees' appear as mere objects of inspection for future exploitation (Said 1978). They are classified in a list of brief descriptions, chiefly related to their abilities and behaviour in times of conflict. Images in this travel account are constructed so as to almost entirely negate any affinity between the traveller and to 'Other' the 'travellees', with no attempts by the former to understand the latter. Arabians (people of the Asir region) and their traditions are depicted only through demeaning stereotypical Orientalist themes such as inferiority, barbarity, and untrustworthiness. In this particular book, a very brief prefatory note is provided by the publisher and in it we are told that the book has been compiled by Captain K. Cornwallis almost entirely from information provided by natives of Asir, written by the author in Cairo but originally gathered in Asir itself around the time of the outbreak of World War I. Strangely, Cornwallis's account is described by his publisher as one of "major historic value to students of the Arabian Peninsula" for there was "almost no European literature on Asir of any value" and no European had previously visited the interior of Asir and furnished a report about it (Cornwallis 1976: 3).
On the other hand, a comparative descriptive examination revealed frequent patterns of modification and mutation shifts related to the representation of individuals and groups in the translated book. Instances of deletion of paragraphs describing people were also detected. Whether positive depictions of people's features and personal qualities, or negative allusions to primitiveness and conservative backwardness, depictions highlighted in the original texts were subject to frequent omissions, both significant and radical. Furthermore, the textual and contextual evidence generated from the micro analysis showed that these three categories of micro shifts were recurrent, which means they impacted the macro level of meaning and overall representation in each TT.