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Drawing on narrative theory and theories of paratext, this article examines the translation of Samar Yazbek’s 2014 Bawa:ba:t ard alʿadam into English, paying close attention to how this text is translated, packaged and circulated for the consumption of Anglophone literary market. It argues that the translation and packaging of Yazbek’s text becomes a means of foregrounding or suppressing certain narratives and of positioning and enacting agency. Considering the metamorphosis of a once peaceful, secular revolution into radicalised insurgency hijacked by Daesh and other extremist groups, this article argues that translatorial agents demonstrate a proclivity to feed entrenched stereotypes and public narratives about the protagonists of the Syrian civil conflict through translation and translation peritexts. Through the use of various textual, contextual, and peritextual framing strategies, the translation appears to be entangled with pre-existing and ideologically motivated public narratives circulating in the West. These narratives include Orientalist depictions of the Arab World and contentious discourses on veiling, oppression, and terrorism, which are reflected in how the highly politicised narratives of the source text are translated, and the way peritextual materials are designed and packaged by the publisher. These effects have ultimately produced the text for the Anglophone readership both familiar and exotic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the morphological behavior of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in terms of developing neologisms related to the new requirements imposed by the outbreak of COVID-19. The data of the study was collected from the news reports of Al-Mamlakah TV, as being the most viewed channel in Jordan during the COVID-19 crisis. The findings of the study revealed that a majority of the collected neologisms were nouns, which provided further support to the theory of onomasiology (Štekauer, 1998). Compounding, borrowing (loan-translation, Arabicization, and hybridization), and semantic extension formed the major word-formation processes for creating such neologisms. Compounds fell into three categories depending on their internal structures: N+Adj, N+N, and more elaborate complex compounds. The first two types were discussed in terms of their headedness and internal syntactic structure with a special reference to the cross-linguistic criteria that were used to identify such compound constructs, whereas the analysis advanced for the third type was inspired by Carstairs-McCarthy (2017). The data analysis revealed interesting aspects in the morphology of COVID-19 neologisms, most noticeably, the higher productivity of (N+N) compounds than (N+Adj) compounds, which goes against the putative assumption that the latter is much commoner in Arabic, identifying new compound types in MSA, namely, N+A metaphoric compounds and N+N hybridized compounds, and the possibility of having newly created three-member complex compounds (i.e., compounds within compounds). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]