Contrastive Analysis of Culture-Specific Items in Two English Translations of “Zuqaq El Midaq” by Naguib Mahfouz

Abstract

This paper seeks to investigate how Culture-specific Items (CSIs) are translated in the two English translations of the Arabic novel “Zuqaq El Midaq” or “Midaq Alley” by the renowned Egyptian novelist and Nobel-Prize laureate, Naguib Mahfouz (1947). The first translation is released by British scholar and translator, Trevor Le Gassick, in 1966. The novel was then retranslated in 2011 by British translator, Humphrey Davies. These two translations are selected because of the 50-year-long distance between them, which would enable the researcher to explore whether or not the lexical choices and translation strategies in both versions changed linguistically over time. The study applies Lawrence Venuti’s (1998) model of domestication and foreignization, and Peter Newmark’s (1988 – 1995) taxonomy of 18 strategies to facilitate the translation of CSIs. The researcher added two translation procedures are omission and mistranslation. The selected CSIs will be examined in terms of the categories set by Newmark (1988), and Espindola and Vasconcellos (2006), along with the model set by Linda Alkhawaja (2014). The study concludes that Le Gassick’s translation tends to be more domesticated than foreignized except in very few subcategories. However, Davies’ translation tends to be more foreignized when compared to Le Gassick’s.