القارئ للدراسات الأدبية و النقدية و اللغوية
Volume 9, Numéro 3, Pages 29-38
2026-10-10
The Archetype Beneath The Saying: Archetype-based Analysis Of Arabic And English Proverb Translation
Authors : Semmari Tarek .
Abstract
Proverbs are among the most challenging elements of language to translate, as their meaning is not anchored in their lexical form but in culturally accumulated associations. This paper examines the translation of proverbs between Arabic and English through Frye’s archetypal analysis, combined with Baker’s translation framework. As a diagnostic tool for proverb translation rather than treating each proverb as an isolated translation problem to be solved. It argues that what a proverb transmits across languages can be understood at two levels: the archetype it invokes, and the cultural vehicle used to encode it. Building on this distinction, the article develops a topology of archetype/vehicle convergence and divergence, and applies it to a corpus of paired Arabic and English proverbs. The analysis shows that a proverb’s translatability is best predicted not by finding a matching expression but by whether the underlying archetype is shared and whether its vehicle is shared.
Keywords
archetypal criticism ; Frye ; Baker ; equivalence ; paremiology ; proverb translation
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