CULTURE-SPECIFIC ITEMS AND THEIR TRANSLATION FROM ARABIC INTO ENGLISH IN ABDULAZIZ AL-MAQALEH'S POEMS

Abstract

Translating culture is presently one of the most challenges in the field of translation studies. The most noticeable arguments of variance between languages arise in their culture-specific items (CSIs) composing serious difficulties in translation. This study explores CSIs and their translation procedures from Arabic into English in Abdulaziz Al-Maqaleh's poetic collection ′the Book of Sana’a′. The theoretical framework deals with poetry translation, classification of cultural categories, and procedures for translating CSIs. The researcher collected data from selected poems and compared them with their English translation. To identify and analyze data, Newmark's (1988) classification of cultural categories and Davies's (2003) model for translating CSIs were adopted to recognize and examine the CSIs and their translation procedures. The findings of this study showed that the translators employed six translation procedures to render CSIs. These procedures are preservation, addition, omission, globalization, localization and transformation. Moreover, it revealed that the preservation procedure was the most frequently employed and the creation procedure was absent.