The Effect of Cultural Distance on Translating Cultural References in al-Zayyat's The Open Door (1960

Abstract

The cultural distance is the distance between two given cultures that is created by the fact that each culture has distinguishing characteristics that have been formed by various factors. These factors include traditions, values, religion, geography, and historical and socio-cultural developments, among others. Such aspects differ from one culture to another by varying degrees, and the differences in such aspects create the distance between two given cultures. This distance is referred to in this study as the cultural distance or the cultural gap. This study aims at investigating how far the cultural distance between Arabic and English influences the translation of cultural references, in terms of conveying their intended meaning in the source text, as well as the connotation(s) and status they have in their culture of origin to the target audience. Cultural references represent a challenging area in translation. However, they are not problematic in themselves, but in relation to the two cultures under translation. They create translation problems because they exist in one culture but not the other, or exist in the other with different value, status, connotations, etc. The wider the gap between the two cultures under translation, the more challenging it is to deal with cultural references. An evident example is the translation from Arabic into English. The complex translation problems cultural references create and the scarcity of studies on their translation from Arabic into English form the rationale of the present study. Therefore, the study conducts a descriptive qualitative analysis of the translation of cultural references in al-Zayyat's novel The Open Door (1960) and its English translation (2000), adopting Ranzato (2013) as a model of analysis. Based on the analysed data, the study demonstrates the great impact exerted by the distance between the source culture and the target culture on translating cultural references. It shows that different forms of translation loss and certain choices of translation strategy in the analysed target text are attributed to this gap