THE CULTURAL GAPS RESULTED IN TRANSLATING SOME SELECTED ARABIC PROVERBS INTO ENGLISH

Abstract

Translation is an instrument of rendition into other realities. It is not just a relationship between two texts as people believe it to be, as much as it is a bond between two cultures. So, translation is the reflection of the spirit of one culture to another. It is an act of passing the spirit of text to receptors of a different culture. When translating proverbs, translation is no longer a reproduction of a given text, rather it transcends the interpretation process and becomes a redefinition of life where it permeates through the others' restraints. However, in a creative text, one is dealing with form and content. Based on Nida's (1964) theory, a text can be dealt with on the basis of formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. The former deals with the form of the text, while the latter deals with the content. Dealing with the content gives the text its cultural creativity in translation. So, the dynamic equivalence is focused on more than the formal equivalence. Besides, this study aims at analyzing some selected Arabic proverbs and cultural-bound expressions. It is to be noted that the data dealt with are standard and colloquial. These data are written in Arabic and then translated into English employing the formal and dynamic equivalents. Finally, the translation of the data have been evaluated employing Nida's (1964) formal and dynamic equivalents in order to see how suitable this translation is regarding the impact of cultural gaps of the proverbs and expressions selected between English and Arabic