Narrative and Description in Translated Travel Discourse RiHalat Al-Gharbi'een ila Shamal Al-Jazerrah Al-Arabiah Unmothajan (Westerners Travels to the North of the Arabian Peninsula: a Model)

Abstract

The purpose of this research paper is to address a theoretical issue by applying it to several journeys that shared temporal and spatial proximity through which Western authors produced travelling literature/discourse describing the northern Arabian Peninsula in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The research aims at highlighting the richness of the translated prose of Western travel literature/discourse. The authors of this literature worked hard to describe places, people, customs and traditions carefully, including all walks of life and reporting the traveler narrator’s description to make the report based on it.

The paper concludes that travel literature shows texts rich with descriptive and narrative records and information. Therefore, it makes a text-types worthy of serious in-depth study utilizing specialized technical methods that highlight its features in its general context, and its specificity, which secure its unique entity which is unmatched by any other travel corpus. Hence, we can reveal the author’s identity, scrutinize his own individual method of composing his text, and show the bond that links this text-type to the stream of narrative travel discourse, and ultimately to literature at large.