On translating culture-bound expressions in Naguib Mahfouz' s the thief and the dogs and strategies : a comparative study in Arabic-English translation

Abstract EN

The translation of Naguib Mahfouz's work has been a reflective source of the Egyptian culture, heritage, and values of the society for the outside world from the time of its writing till now.

Therefore, many of his works have been translated into English and other languages, including the present one The Thief and the Dogs” Allasu Walkalab”, the topic of this research.

This comparative study aims to find out strategies, similarities, and differences in the English translation of an Arabic descriptive text in one of the greatest works, translated by Trevor Le Gassick and Mohamed Badawi.

This research paper applies Mona Baker's (1992) theory to define the translation strategies used in the novel that serve the delivery of the cultural bound terms in the original text message.

The corpus of the study consists of (159) cultural bound terms selected from the original text of the novel.

Corpus are classified according to the types and context into historical, religious, ecological, psychological, and material cultural bound terms.

Finally, a conclusion is drawn based on the assessment of the English translation; frequencies and percentages are calculated.

It has been found that seven strategies are implemented but the most usable one is paraphrasing.

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