Strategies for Translating Culture-Specific Metaphor on Taboos in Abdo Khal’s “Throwing Sparks”

Abstract

This paper investigates the strategies of translating Arabic culture-specific metaphor on taboos into English in “Throwing Sparks” by Abdo Khal, the 2010 winner of the Arabic Booker prize. The paper introduces the Triangle of Culture-specific Metaphor on Taboos (TCMT), which explains the intertwined relations between using cultural elements in metaphor to express taboo in a literary work. The study aims to answer the question of how do translators tackle culture-specific metaphors on taboos, and duly suggests means to improve them. Samples from four taboo types are selected for analysis, namely sex, homosexuality, poverty and slavery. The study finds that the techniques used to render the culture-specific metaphor on taboos are keeping the metaphor when the target reader is thought to understand the culture element, changing the metaphor for another type using explicitation when the target reader is thought to misunderstand the culture element and demetaphorizing the metaphor when the topic is not seen as a taboo in the target culture. The study suggests solutions for the translation of culture-specific metaphors, especially when they have religious reference, as the translators tended to translate them literally, which resulted in producing absurd images that create flaws in the semantics of the utterance.