Analysis of Culture-Specific Items and Translation Strategies Applied in Translating Ezzat El Kamhawy's House of the Wolf

Abstract

Intercultural competence constitutes a complex phenomenon to translators owing to the crucial interplay between culture and language, which causes translators to encounter difficulties in the translation of culture-specific items. Newmark, emphasizes the fact that each language has its own ‘culturally' bound structures and features which are reflective of people's attitudes, behaviours and ways of thinking. The present study aims to evaluate the translation of the culture-specific items in one of the contemporary Egyptian novels entitled ‘House of The Wolf'. It investigates whether or not the translator has succeeded in maintaining the local color of the Egyptian culture via an effective rendering of the culture-specific items into the target text.  The study further examines the translation techniques and strategies used to translate these culture-specific items in order to maintain the flavour of the source culture. The novel was written by Ezzat El Kamhawi in 2010, who is an Egyptian novelist and journalist, and was translated into English by Nancy Roberts in 2013, who is an award-winning translator of Arabic literature. The author's beautiful craftsmanship and simple storytelling, often poetic style, entitled the novel to win the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2012.  The novel sheds light on a peaceful Egyptian village that witnesses Ottoman rule in the early nineteenth century until the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and creates an intricate picture wherein drastic developments in the tangled and complex relationships within the family and the unexpected and often shattering events outside the village are intertwined. Nord's functional model in translation quality assessment is adopted as a theoretical framework. Newmark's model of classifying ‘culturally' bound features is deployed and the strategies and techniques which he proposes for dealing with the cultural gap are thoroughly investigated during the course of the analysis. Furthermore, a light is shed on two of the most important translation strategies in literary texts: foreignization and domestication. In evaluating the translation of the culture-specific items, it is revealed that Nancy Roberts resorts to some  foreign is in translation techniques such as ‘naturalisation', ‘cultural borrowing' and ‘literal translation', which help maintain the foreignness of the source text, and some domesticating translation techniques such as ‘cultural equivalence', ‘equivalence' and ‘neutralisation', which have been used  in order to acquaint the target audience with various aspects pertaining to the Egyptian culture and produce a natural and transparent target text. The findings point out that Roberts succeeds to a certain extent in maintaining the flavour of the Egyptian culture in the target text via the transliteration of names, titles and places.