Translation of socio-cultural expressions: The case of the English translation of Al-Koni’s Nazi:F al-Hajar–the Bleeding of the Stone

Abstract

Literary translation has been widely discussed in modern translation studies because it presents diverse problems, including linguistic and cultural aspects so inherent during the translation process. The mistranslation of socio-cultural expressions is one such issue. This study investigates and analyses the techniques used in translating the Arabic socio-cultural expressions that appear in Ibrahim al-Koni’s Nazi:f al-Hajar, which was published in 1992; and its English translation, The Bleeding of the Stone, published in 2002 by May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley. In the study, a comparison between the source text (Arabic) and the target text (English) was undertaken to observe the quality of the translation via adopting House’s (1997) model for translation quality assessment, and thereby identify the techniques being used. Some problems were noted in the translation of Arabic socio-cultural expressions into English. These problems were attributed to the cultural differences between Arabic and English, as evidenced by the unrecognisability of certain socio-cultural expressions in the source language and their nonexistence in the receptor culture, as well as the non-use of certain translation techniques.