Translating the Culturally Implicit: Limitations to Creativity

Abstract

This paper is about the impact of the cultural differences on translation task. To take the last level, give rise to lexical gaps evinced in incongruous ideological, social and ecological terms which relate to highly sensitive issues such as religion and politics or those pertaining to institutions and nomenclature. To bring about some gain, the translated text (from Arabic into English / English into Arabic) is a laborious task on the part of the competent translator who has to resort to certain strategies, such as those of compensation, domestication, and explication. On the textual level, for instance, the translator may utilize different types of references; and in the stylistic / rhetoric level he / she may adopt the strategy of compensation whereby he could plant in the target text metaphor equivalent to non-metaphor in the source text to atone for an inevitable loss of a preceding rhetorical feature in the source text .Furthermore, equilibrium should be maintained with regard to los and gain in literary translation. The translation techniques /procedures applied in this paper are used in order to mention the importance of translator’s knowledge /competence in choosing the target strategies as solutions to maintain and perform SL text analysis / TL text reproduction correctly. Besides that, this paper takes into account some important points such as the characteristics of literary texts, literary translation difficulties, the relationship between translation and culture, and ambiguity /creativity in translation.