Strategies for Translating Idioms and Proverbs from English into Arabic

Abstract

Translation is essential for promoting understanding of different genres and in different languages. As more and more information is published globally, the need for translating a wide range of document types has emerged, including books and movies, that often require that they are rendered to meet the linguistic needs of the target audience. While linguistic and grammatical translation might be easy, culturally bound items in the conversation impact the approaches used in translation, often causing various challenges in effectively rendering a source from one language to another. Proverbs and idiomatic expressions are essential to everyday communication but are culturally bound to Spatiotemporal conditions. Giving them a literal translation might distort the intended meaning, primarily due to the cultural differences between the source and target languages. The current analysis is of the translation techniques adopted in the work of George Orwell, Animal Farm, and One Thousand and One English Proverbs Translated into Arabic by Omar Jabak. Consequently, the proverbs and idiomatic expressions are challenging to translate due to their cultural nature. Baker’s (2011) taxonomy indicates that translating proverbs and idioms has resulted in adopting various techniques, including translations by omitting parts of the expression, paraphrasing, and using similar phrases in the target language. Concerning the translation of proverbs, the current data set confirmed that there are only two most appropriate translation techniques. That is a literal translation and paraphrasing, distorting the proverb's meaning in the target language.