An intertextual approach to Arabic-English translation

Abstract EN

This study investigates some problems faced by translators while translating intertextual expressions or texts that depend heavily on other previous texts from Arabic English.

Intertextual expressions have been classified into three categories,namely,religious intertextuality, historical and literary intertextuality and other types of intertextuality such as proverbs, songs, poetry and sayings.

It is found that the problems arising from translating such types of intertextual references vary in difficulty depending on the culture-specificity of the intertextual reference under focus.Therefore, some translation strategies have been suggested to deal with each type of intertextual references.