On translating the cultural aspects in Tayeb Saleh’s season of migration to the north
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Date
2024
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University of the Western Cape
Abstract
Tayeb Saleh’s Novel Season of Migration to the North is a pristine mirror of society and its values, particularly that of Oriental and Western civilizations. Both civilizations have traditions which birth a necessity of communicative events, necessitating the use of culturally-specific terms and expressions. However, the book is originally written in Arabic, and was translated into many other languages, thus requiring a specific type of knowledge to be held by the translator in order to recode the novel from the source language to the target language. It is easy to simply take a word and find its equivalent in the target language, then run the rest of the text on that basis. Although, some words will string together lexically perfectly fine but what if they mean something entirely different to what the literal words show? How is the translator able to record such expressions correctly so the meanings of those words are conveyed and what does he do in order to arrive at such methods? This study aims to shed light on how the translator overcame obstacles when translating such expressions used specifically within a culture or societal group to relay a message not meant to be taken literally but simply understood based on the commonalities of being part of such a group. This aim will be achieved through a qualitative approach of critically analyzing the original text of the novel Season of Migration to the North, using examples of the text where culturally-specific expressions or even jargon are used. The English translations of these expressions will then be analyzed alongside the Arabic ones in order to shed light on the techniques used by the translator in order to overcome certain cultural obstacles and then correctly convey the meaning from the source to the target language.
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Keywords
Cultural hybridity, translation, untranslatability, literature, allegoric expressions