Linguistic culture refers to the differences between languages in terms of linguistic features and styles, including the differences between use of vocabulary and tenses.
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As Nida (1964b:94) stated: “Language is a part of culture, but translation from one language to another involves, in addition to the other cultural problems, the special characteristics of the respective languages”. A language may have more than one name for a natural phenomenon for example, whereas others might have only one. Returning to the earlier example, the source culture may have only one word to refer to “snow”. However, the target culture may be one in which there are multiple ways of describing the same climatic phenomenon. Also, Arabic and English differ completely in terms of the tenses they employ. As Gazala points out, English is widely recognized for its wide usage of both the “present and past perfect tenses” whereas “these two tenses have no precise equivalent in Arabic. This causes a problem for students who try hard to convey the exact time of action implied” (1995: 69). Translators should therefore take into account the various types of differences and disparities between source culture and target culture in terms of ecology together with material, social, religious and linguistic culture as shown above.
It has been observed that when translators try to translate a cultural sign such as proverbs, they might come across loaded phrases that may be hard to understood for the TL recipients due to cultural problems. Mailhac (1996:133-134) refers to this kind of problem as a cultural reference [CR] and explains:
[S]uffice it to say that by CR we mean any reference to a cultural entity which, due to its distance from the target culture, is characterized by a sufficient degree of opacity for the target reader to constitute a problem.
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According to him, there is a large gap between cultures and what translators have to do is to narrow this gap in order to achieve the target receptor’s satisfaction with the translated text.
Translating cultural signs is a controversial issue for scholars and translators. The latter are generally encouraged to use different procedures, which contribute to conveying the content of the cultural signs to the target recipients. This is the case for Valdimir (1987:37) who stresses that when rendering elements of the source culture which are absent from the target culture: “The translator relies on different procedures that enable him to convey to members of the target culture the content of that particular element”. This implies that the translator is free to use any available linguistic procedures, methods, and approaches in order to modify the translated text with the aim of conveying the significance of a cultural sign. The translation of MSAPs poses a number of difficulties for translators attempting to translate these from Arabic into English.
Valdimir (1987) continues his explanatory description of finding a suitable tool in order to convey the intended meaning to the target receptors. He postulates that when the target culture lacks a given element (be this an object, concept, social institution, pattern of behaviour, etc.), its language will normally lack an expression for it, and it is the translator’s task to find an expression in the TL that will adequately convey the missing element to speakers of that language. Valdimir’s argument for finding an expression in the TL appears impossible, especially when translating between two remotely unrelated cultures such as Arabic and English. Moreover Arab cultural signs are quite different from Arabic. It may therefore not
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possible to find an expression that will be able to substitute an Arabic term in the target culture. This is because the differences in environment, religion, habits and customs between Arab and British culture are maybe too difficult for translators to render satisfactorily. Newmark (1988:94) also supports this point of view stating that: “There is a translation problem due to the cultural ‘gap’ or ‘distance’ between the source and target languages.” In spite of the claims which were provided regarding translation and culture, I completely agree with Wilss’ (1996:90) opinion that:
In order to avoid cultural (pragmatic) failure and to obtain in the target culture the same level of impact and appeal as the original text has had in the source culture, the translator may have to adopt, at least in certain translation environments such as Bible translation, rather intricate and sophisticated roundabout or adaptive strategies.
When translating the MSAPs the aforementioned difficulties are inevitably unavoidable because most of them do not have any equivalent in English. Accordingly, they should be subjected to a special technique whereby it is preferable to mention the proverb’s situation of occurrence which does not have its equivalent in the target culture. In this way, the intended meaning will become clear to English native speakers.
As the main concern of this study is to translate MSAPs, it is considered advisable to shed some light on the proverbs by examining some scholarly definitions of this linguistic feature. In addition, metaphors and idioms will be defined and discussed in
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the following sections in order to demonstrate the differences between them and avoid confusion.