Translating Idiomatic Expressions from Arabic into English in Essam Youssef’s A Quarter Gram: Challenges and Strategies

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Lecturer, Faculty of Languages, MSA University, Egypt.

Abstract

Idioms per se are linguistic units with different semantic, pragmatic and cultural facets which pose some untranslatability challenges so as to render the closest interlingual source text (ST)-target text (TT) pairs, especially in literary texts. The present paper aims at investigating the strategies of translating idioms from Arabic into English in Essam Youssef’s A Quarter Gram (2008) ربع جرام translated by Loubna Youssef (2009). The analytical decoding process for the idiomatic structures is classified according to Abou-Zalal (2007) for the Arabic idioms and Fernando (1996) for the English ones, using an eclectic model of Nida and Taber (1982), Al-Shawi and Mahadi (2012) and Baker (2018). It reveals that the most employed strategies are the strategy of using an idiom of a similar meaning but dissimilar in form (38.25%), translation by paraphrase (29.95%), partial translation of the idiom (12.21%), using an idiom of similar meaning and similar form (9.22%) and borrowing the SL idiom (6.45%). The study exhibits the translator’s keenness to retain the idiomaticity of the ST with all its implications by employing different idiomatic rendering strategies actualizing both faithfulness and acceptability of the TT.
 

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