4.

Writing Your Theoretical Part

1 Overviewing • Start your theoretical part by explaining the theory you have
the main settled on.
theoretical • Use examples from your own knowledge (don’t use the
framework examples in the orientation ppt or those in your data).
2 Reviewing • A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a
the literature specific topic.
• The literature review is an overview of current knowledge,
allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps
in the existing research.
o You may want to look for papers that used the
theoretical framework you focused on and comment on
their findings and how they pertain to your work. You
must seek actual research on CSIs in translation and see
what questions other researchers are asking and how
they answer them.
• A literature review shows your readers that you have an in-
depth grasp of your subject.
• A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it
analyzes and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the
state of knowledge on the subject.
Steps of writing your literature review:
• Step 1 – Search for relevant literature
- Start by creating a list of keywords related to your topic
and research question
- Use your keywords to begin searching for sources in
reliable databases.
- Read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant
to your question.
• Step 2 – Evaluate and select sources
- Make sure the sources you use are credible (i.e., published
via/on reliable websites such as journal and university
websites).
- Make sure you read any important studies and major
theories in your field of research.
- It is important to keep track of your sources with citations
to avoid plagiarism.
- You can use this template to keep track, summarize and
evaluate the sources you’re thinking about using. Click
here to download the template.
- Take notes that you can later include into the text of your
literature review.
• Step 3 – Identify themes, debates, and gaps
- Understand the connections and relationships between the
sources you’ve read and find out how your paper can
contribute to current research. For instance, you establish
connections by answering these questions: what questions
or concepts recur across the studies? where do sources
 disagree? what is missing from the literature? Are there
weaknesses that need to be addressed?
• Step 4 – Outline your literature review’s structure
- You can organize your literature review chronologically,
thematically, methodologically, or theoretically.
• Step 5 – Write your literature review
- Like any other academic writing, your literature review
should include an introduction, a main body, and a
conclusion.
- The introductory sentence should clearly establish the
focus and purpose of the literature review (e.g., While
there has been much research on machine translation
evaluation, only few studies have examined the quality of
English-into-Arabic machine translation. THEN START
MENTIONING THOSE FEW STUDIES).
- In the body, give an overview of the main points of each
source and combine them into a coherent whole.
- Don’t just paraphrase other researchers—add your own
interpretations where possible, discussing the significance
of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
- Mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources (if
possible).
- Use transition words and topic sentences to draw
connections, comparisons and contrasts
- In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings
you have taken from the literature.
- Be sure to show how your research addresses gaps and
contributes new knowledge or discuss how you have drawn
on existing theories and methods to build a framework for
your research.

This section is taken from Scribbr’s Guide to Literature review. For

more details, click here.
3 Additional • While reviewing the literature on the translation of CSIs and
theoretical after looking at your abstract, you might find that the
framework translator’s behavior is better explained in light of another
framework besides the main one.
• We’ve already suggested extensions to the question of CSIs
translation in light of theories of loss and gain and
domestication and foreignization, communicative vs semantic
translation.
• To make this addition and give extra dimensions to your
analysis later on, you have to overview the framework you
want to integrate in this section.
• Overviewing the additional framework is important because it
introduces the reader to concepts you’ll be mentioning in the
analysis and it explains your rationale for complementing the
main theoretical framework.
 5 Preliminary • You have to submit an analyzed example from your extract to
example allow us to give you feedback on strengths and weaknesses of
(ungraded) your analysis. You should cover the following points in your
analysis:
- Identify the type of the CSI.
- Explain the CSI and consult dictionaries whenever required.
- Highlight the significance of the CSI by analyzing its context.
- Identify the strategy used to translate the CSI, explain whether
it was successfully rendered in the TT and highlight what
aspects of meaning were lost, compensated for, or gained in
translation.
- Suggest another translation, back your suggestions with
evidence again (this is VERY IMPORTANT because it
highlights your contribution as a researcher and a translator)

*APA formatting, in-text citations and referencing guidelines must be observed every
step of the way.