Master’s Degree Awarded to Ms. Naseem Amer in Translation
Master’s Degree Awarded to Ms. Naseem Amer in Translation
Ms. Naseem Abdullah Abdullah Mohammed Amer was awarded a Master’s Degree in Translation with an average of Excellent and a grade of (95%) for her thesis titled: Motivation Choices of Professional Translation in Translating Magazine Articles from English to Arabic: Forced Migration Review Magazine as a Case-in-Point, which was submitted to the Community Center for Translation and Language Teaching – Sana’a University. The MA defense was held on Monday, May 18, 2026.
The MA Viva-voce Committee, which was formed based on a resolution issued by the Graduate Studies and Scientific Research Council, consisted of the following:
Prof. Ibraheem N. Tagaddeen Internal Examiner, Chair
Prof. Mujeeb Ali Qasim Main Supervisor, Member
Prof. Mansour Jarallah Ahmed Sarhan External Examiner Member
The thesis aimed to:
Explore translation challenges and problems in articles translated from English into Arabic in the journal Forced Migration Review (FMR).
Identify the strategies applied to address these challenges based on Baker’s (2018) classification of non-equivalence at the word level.
Evaluate the motivations underlying translators’ choices according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Analyze the reasons behind the selection of translation strategies and relate each level of Maslow’s hierarchy to different translation strategies.
The study yielded several key findings summarized as follows:
Translators’ choices of translation strategies are not random, but are motivated by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, including safety, belongingness, self-esteem, and self-actualization.
Translators employ specific strategies to satisfy different needs within Maslow’s hierarchy.
There exists a continuous motivational progression in translators’ behavior, moving from safety needs toward self-actualization.
Translation is not merely a linguistic process, but also a psychological process driven by motivation.
In light of these findings, the researcher recommended the following:
Exploring non-equivalence beyond the word level, including lexical patterns such as collocations, idiomatic expressions, and fixed phrases.
Investigating grammatical non-equivalence problems related to number, gender, and person.
Giving greater attention to textual equivalence, including thematic and informational structures.
Encouraging future studies on pragmatic equivalence, as achieving coherence, cohesion, and meaning reconstruction represents a major challenge in translation.
The defense session was attended by a number of academics, researchers, students, colleagues, and the researcher’s family.
