Contrastive Analysis of Culture-Specific Items in Two English Translations of “Zuqaq El Midaq” by Naguib Mahfouz (original) (raw)
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ADAB AL-RAFIDAYN, 2020
Translation can be viewed as a cross-cultural task in which the translator acts as an intercultural mediator. Thus, the unique culture of the East can be introduced to the West world via the process of translation. One way of introducing Arabic culture to the West is through the translation of Arabic famous literary works into English. Ziqaq Al-Midaq by Najeeb Mahfooz, the Egyptian novelist and the winner of Noble Prize, is one of the best Arabian novels that has been translated into many languages including Italian, French, and English. Humphrey, D. & Gassic, T. made great efforts to put the novel in English but they have succeeded in one place and failed in another as the present study will show to the reader later on. Ziqaq Al-Midaq is full of culture-bound expressions that would trigger many difficulties and make the translation of it a thorny and tricky task because many of these items do not have equivalents in the target language. Also, the recurrent inappropriate choices made by the selected translators seriously affected the quality of their translation product .
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International Journal of Research Studies in Education, 2015
The lexical presence of culture in a literary work mostly appears in form of culture-specific items. Due to cultural distance, translating these challenging elements, i.e. culture-specific items, is of real significance in the translation process. Translating these items entails, among others, adopting the dichotomy of Domestication or Foreignization. The present study sought to find which of the strategies was used more frequently in the English translation of the Persian literary masterpiece Shazdeh Ehtejab, translated by Buchan (2005). To do so, at first, thirty-four culture-specific items were extracted and then analyzed according to Newmark's categorization (1988) of culture-specific items. Then, these items were examined according to Aixela's model of translating culture-specific items (1996), which divides all the strategies into two broader categories of Domestication and Foreignization, to find the more frequent strategy. The result showed that Domestication with eighty-two percent was more frequent, which stood as the main approach of the translator. Moreover, as a subcategory of Domestication, synonymy was the most frequent strategy with thirty-nine percent. By applying domesticated equivalents, the translator hides the local color of the source text. The findings in this study have pedagogical implications for literary translators.
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2012
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