Bridging al-Ḍād and Shakespeare’s Tongue: Conceptual–Constructional Mapping in Arabic–English Translation

Abstract

Translation between Arabic and English is often introduced through visible contrasts in script, sound, word order, and morphology. Those contrasts matter, but they do not fully explain why an apparently accurate translation may still alter agency, weaken a metaphor, change the degree of certainty, or flatten the rhythm of an argument. This article develops Conceptual–Constructional Mapping (CCM) as an interdisciplinary framework for locating such losses. CCM brings together contrastive linguistics, cognitive semantics, construction grammar, discourse pragmatics, and functional translation theory. Rather than treating equivalence as a search for matching words, it asks where a particular meaning is encoded in each language: in a root-and-pattern form, an argument-structure construction, a modal expression, a referential choice, a metaphor family, or a rhetorical sequence. The article is a conceptual-methodological study supported by close analysis of representative Modern Standard Arabic and English examples and by a corpus-ready protocol suitable for the United Nations Parallel Corpus and OPUS collections. Seven recurrent risk zones are examined: derivational morphology, valency and voice, motion-event framing, modality and evidential stance, definiteness and reference tracking, metaphor, and rhetorical texture. The discussion shows that many translation failures arise when meaning is preserved at one level but displaced at another. CCM therefore proposes a layered mapping record that connects linguistic form, conceptual frame, discourse function, translation purpose, and ethical consequences. The framework offers practical value for translator education, corpus-based research, revision, and quality assessment while avoiding deterministic claims that Arabic and English represent wholly separate worlds.