A cultural approach to translating the forgotten legacy of the Egyptian folk : a case study of Mawwal Badriya

Abstract EN

For language is a cultural construct, certain cultural untranslatability is implied in any process of translation.

Cultural problems may occur mainly in the translation of socio – cultural topics, especially in case of sophisticated literatures like, proverbs, folk, myths, satire, humour, etc and especially in relation to idioms, images similes and metaphors.

One of the areas full of figures is the public Egyptian folk "Mawwal" in which there is one unique life of Egyptian society. This type of literary work is chosen due to its great role in formulating the Egyptian identity in the 60s and 70s.

The present paper attempts to examine some strategies in non-equivalence translation, and finds out cultural problems.

The data is collected from the recorded song entitled Badreya, transcribed into Arabic then translated into English.

Translation strategies for dealing with non-equivalence proposed by Baker (1992) are applied as a theoretical framework for the research.

Results show some cultural problems and some strategies of translation are focused on this study.