Mrs Maha Shamakhi

Maha Shamakhi is a PhD candidate at Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne. She received her BA degree in English language and translation from King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia and her master’s degree in Linguistics from California State University, Fresno, USA. Her areas of interest are linguistics, translation, and the culture and linguistic perspective of translation. Maha is a researcher in the areas of: Translation and Interpretation Studies; Stylistics and Textual Analysis; Middle Eastern Languages; and Islamic Studies. Maha is currently researching Lexical and Structural ambiguities in Legal Translations from Arabic into English using Domestication and Foreignisation Approaches.

Resolving Lexical Ambiguity in Translations of Jurisprudential Terminologies in Inheritance Law

Although many studies have investigated translation ambiguities in Arabic to English Islamic terminologies, few have addressed lexical ambiguities. Using Ventui's domestication and ‘foreignisation’ approach, this paper investigates such ambiguities in inheritance laws, where certain Jurisprudential Terminologies lack equivalence in English. The two aims are to determine how lexical differences between Arabic and English affect intended meaning; and to find out how domestication and foreignisation can help resolve such ambiguities. Contrastive linguistic analysis is used to compare inheritance law translations with source texts, using Venuti’s theoretical framework to allow analysis at the cultural level.