مجلة الاداب واللغات
Volume 6, Numéro 3, Pages 32-45
2018-12-31
Diction, Culture, And Identity: Translating Egyptian Cultural Expressions In Naguib Mahfouz's The Thief And The Dogs
Authors : ابتسام بوعنيقة .
Abstract
Abstract: This article examines the translation of Egyptian cultural expressions in Naguib Mahfouz's novel The Thief and the Dogs (1961), translated into English by Trevor Le Gassick and M. M. Badawi. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from translation studies — particularly the concepts of foreignization and domestication (Venuti, 1995/2005), cultural equivalence, and semantic translation — the article argues that a thorough analysis of a writer's diction is a prerequisite for any successful literary translation. Mahfouz's prose is deeply embedded in Egyptian sociocultural life: it mobilizes religious formulae, idioms of honor, and popular cultural metaphors that function not merely as decorative elements but as load-bearing pillars of character construction, thematic architecture, and narrative atmosphere. Through the close reading of selected parallel passages from the Arabic source text and the English translation, this study demonstrates that the translators systematically resort to omission, communicative substitution, and domesticating equivalence — strategies that, while rendering the text accessible to Anglophone readers, simultaneously strip it of the very cultural specificity that defines Mahfouz's literary project. The article proposes alternative translation strategies, including borrowing with explanatory annotation and the mobilization of biblical or liturgical equivalents in the target language, as more adequate means of preserving the foreign cultural identity. The findings confirm that literary translation is not a neutral linguistic act but a deeply ideological one, and that the translator's primary ethical responsibility is to introduce the Other rather than to domesticate it.
Keywords
Naguib Mahfouz, literary translation, cultural identity, Egyptian cultural expressions, foreignization, domestication, The Thief and the Dogs
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