Strategies Used in the Translation of Allusions in Naguib Mahfouz's "Drift on the Nile"

Abstract

Understanding cultural concepts requires an understanding of social and cultural elements. This study focuses on allusions among cultural notions. For translators, the presence of allusions presents greater challenges than a text's syntactic or semantic difficulties. Allusion translation is considered a reader-centered procedure. A literary text usually presents the culture that produced it; that is why it is challenging to convey the source cultural background through translation. Literary texts represent a culture full of intertextual relations and references to other cultural or historical texts. A literary translator has some problems translating these ‘cultural bumps’ from one language into another. One of the main problems in literary translation that causes cultural gaps is the use of allusions. The researcher attempted to identify Ritva Leppihalme's model in her book Culture Bumps: An Empirical Approach to the Translation of Allusions (1997) to effectively convey subliminal meanings and communicate cultural and religious allusions. Some excerpts from Mahfouz's "Adrift on the Nile" and its English translation by Frances Liardet in 1993 are examined to explain the strategies used to overcome the cultural bumps. This novel was chosen due to its abundance of literary and religious references, historical figure names, native Egyptian proverbs, and modified sections from the Prophet's Hadith and the Holy Quran.