The Jazz age through Arabic lenses : a comparative analysis of two Arabic translations of the great Gatsby based on Venuti's domestication and foreignization theory of translation

Abstract EN

The present paper aims to examine the use of domestication and foreignization strategies in the translation of Western literary fiction into Arabic.

By reflecting on a comparative textual analysis of a corpus consisting of the novel The Great Gatsby, written by prominent American writer F.

Scott Fitzgerald (1925), and two Arabic translations by Najeeb el Manie' (1961) and Hani Yared & Muhammed Hittini (2008), this study assesses the validity of the so-called Retranslation Hypothesis (RH), mainly the underlying assumption that the initial translation of a literary work tends to be domesticated while the later subsequent retranslation tends to be foreignized.

After investigating the procedures applied in rendering the cultural references in the two translations, the findings revealed the predominance of foreignization and adherence to source-oriented norms in both translations, which is indicative that the RH does not have a general validity as it does not hold true against empirical data.