Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Translation No.4 May, 2015 Pp.127- 138
Cultural Equivalence in the Translations of Paul Bowles
The Case of: For Bread Alone(2006)
Karima BOUZIANE
Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences,
Chouaib Doukkali University, El Jadida, Morocco
Abstract:
The aim of this research is to find out the type of cultural equivalence adopted in the Moroccan novels translated by Paul Bowles. The study took the case of Mouhamed Choukri’s autobiography Al_khubz Al_hafi (2000) and its English version For Bread Alone. Adopting Nida’s (1964) model of biblical translation, formal and dynamic equivalence, the study attempted to investigate whether the Moroccan cultural concepts in Al_khubz Al_hafi were transferred formally or dynamically. A number of Arabic and Moroccan Arabic sentences and their English equivalents were selected. Then, the type of equivalence was determined and counted. The results of this research revealed that formal- form for form- equivalence was rarely used; however, dynamic -sense for sense- equivalence was significantly employed in transferring the Moroccan cultural concepts into English. Generally, the translator resorted to dynamic equivalence to add, explain, replace or omit source linguistic terms at the expense of cultural concepts; this resulted in a significant cultural loss and misrepresentation of the Moroccan culture. The study concluded that dynamic equivalence as a target culture- oriented type of translation was not effective in the translation of Al_khubz Al_hafi since it obscured many source cultural concepts.
Keywords: culture, dynamic equivalence, formal equivalence, translation
