Translating immigration in the multicultural and multilingual United States of America

Abstract

As part of its civic integration of new immigrants into the American society, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published a guide for new immigrants in English and its translations in 14 languages. This paper analyzes USCIS’s English publication titled Welcome to the United States: A Guide for New Immigrants and its Arabic official translation titled مرحبا بكم في الولايات المتحدة: دليل المهاجرين الجدد. The purpose of this paper is to identify any potential translation problems and its impact on the linguistic comprehensibility and the reading experience. Due to the linguistic and cultural differences between English and Arabic, a number of problems are found in the Arabic translation. These problems are categorized under pragmatic, convention-related, linguistic, and text-specific translation problems. The most frequent problems found are linguistic translation problems, particularly semantics and lexical choices. The findings suggest that pragmatic, convention-related, linguistic, and text-specific problems may partially distort the message of the original text, hence contribute to the ambiguity when read by the Arabic-speaking new immigrant to the United States. It is therefore suggested that the Arabic USCIS Guide for New Immigrants needs to be edited by a native professional editor.