Translating Cultures Literary Texts as a Case Study

Abstract

Language and culture are extensively interrelated.
Language, embedded in a specific cultural frame, reflects the
collective experiences of the language community and its social
values. Culture, on the other hand, is derived from the collective
experiences of the language community and is considered as the
interpretive system for our cognitive and conceptual perceptions.
Thus, literary translation involves various challenges where
words carry far-reaching social and cultural associations in order
to enlighten us about how other peoples live, think, and believe.
In this paper, our main point is to show how cultural adjustments
of a target text to a specific target culture will have an active
effect on the appreciation and understanding of these
perceptions. To achieve this, the study hypothesizes that
successful intercultural communication depends on the
intercultural recognition of the cultural values in both languages.
This successful cultural recognition of both languages is of great
relevance in determining the translator‟s wide range of
translation strategies. In other words, the translation's choice of
each strategy is adopted according to text function and the effect
on the TL reader. The paper also discusses the most frequently
used translation procedures applied in translating those
language-specific and culturally alluded segments from English
into Arabic.