With Pride and Deep Respect: Master’s Thesis of the Late Student Raghad Saadoun Wadi Defended at the University of Basrah on Translators’ Prefaces from English into Arabic – A Paratextual Study
A master’s thesis by the late student Raghad Saadoun Wadi was discussed at the College of Arts, University of Basrah. Raghad tragically lost her life along with four members of her family in the fire disaster that struck a hypermarket mall in Wasit Governorate on Wednesday, July 16, 2025. Her academic advisor, Prof. Dr. Kazem Khalaf Al-Ali, represented her during the thesis defense and responded to the committee’s questions on her behalf.
The thesis aimed to examine translators’ prefaces as essential paratextual elements in translations from English into Arabic, within a theoretical framework based on Gérard Genette’s (1997) theory of textual thresholds and Kathryn Batchelor’s (2018) approach to paratexts as autonomous communicative acts.
The study presented a thematic and functional analysis of 50 randomly selected translators’ prefaces, with the goal of identifying their thematic patterns and functional characteristics.
The findings revealed that translators’ prefaces in the Arabic context are primarily oriented toward intellectual mediation and reader support, rather than self-promotion or formal convention. The study also highlighted a dominance of interpretive and explanatory functions, reflecting a preference for intellectual engagement with the source text.
The thesis recommended the adoption of the analytical model proposed by Wadi and Al-Ali (2025) for examining translators’ prefaces across languages, and called for continued research into these paratextual domains, which contribute to a deeper understanding of the translator’s role, textual mediation, and the cultural communication embedded in such thresholds.
Department of Media and Governmental Communication
