الفهرس 
THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES
Descriptive Corpus LexicographyOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Translators aim at providing the closest equivalent of the source word or text. The more the source and the target texts are similar to each other, at all linguistic and sociocultural levels, the more faithful the translation is. This thesis addresses the challenge of rendering English equivalents of the most frequent CECA word on social media streams. To this end, it follows a descriptive corpus-based approach to collect, analyze, and to suggest American and British translation of the most frequent CECA words on Facebook and Twitter in the interval from 2012 to 2016. Social media platforms are intentionally recruited because of the increasing significance of user-generated digital content to lexicography.
The main contribution of this thesis is constructing a 1000-word Arabic-English lexicon covering CECA words. The Arabic segment of the lexicon provides users with rich linguistic information about the polysemous meanings, synonymous words, hypernyms, co-hyponyms and brief definition of each headword. The study also records some statistical findings about the word‘s increasing, decreasing, stationary, fluctuant, introduced or revived occurrence during the studied interval. Thus, the descriptive information in this part can be mapped into different Arabic resources, such as Arabic WN, to enrich the Modern Standard Arabic entries with their colloquial related words.
At the translation level, the proposed lexicon suggests a standardized methodology to provide and assess the abstract concept of translation equivalence. The adopted methodology makes an extensive use of colloquial Arabic corpus, English corpus of urban dictionaries, Arabic and English ontologies. It integrates the ontolexical relations of a word with its authentic contemporary usage in order to render the closest English translation which linguistically, ontologically and culturally corresponds to the source word. Thus, even if perfect equivalence is philosophically unattainable, obtaining the most appropriate equivalents is still affordable. Moreover, the degree of equivalence can be objectively measured, according to the (dis)similarities between the word relations and senses.
The CECA lexicon reports some sociolinguistic findings. It indicates the widespread of many negative concepts and practices in the society, such as malediction, deception, impurity and sullenness. It also highlights the increasing politeness elements in the female discourse, if compared to the male counterpart. Moreover, it refers, on the one hand, to the linguistic and cultural similarities between the CECA corpus and the informal American one, which is reflected in the semi-perfect equivalence translation. The lexicon manifests, on the other hand, the considerable difference, at both the linguistic and cultural levels, between the CECA and the British informal discourses.