Contextualized translation

Abstract

This article aims to shed light upon the difficulty that arises when translating culture-specific proverbial utterances from a source language (SL) to a target language (TL). For this particular purpose, we select a number of both quasi-universal and culture-specific Moroccan Arabic proverbs (MAPs) to investigate their translatability into English. The study unfolds that the extent to which MAPs are successfully translated into English is closely related to their cultural load. Whereas the translator can accurately replace quasi-universal MAPs with their English equivalents, the translation of culture-specific MAP’s is rather problematic. The process of this translation is obstructed mainly because these MAPs are carriers of cultural values, beliefs, and ideas that are not common or have no equivalents in English cultural background. To overcome this obstacle, we suggest a translation strategy that can be used to appropriately translate culture-specific MAPs into English. We argue that this strategy enables the TL recipients (TLRs) to derive the right interpretation of the source proverb (SP) even when it bears no relevance in their culture.