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Article published In:
Babel
Vol. 63:4 (2017) ► pp.486–505

Impact of mother culture on the process of translating culture-specific idioms

| Sana’a University, Yemen | Arab Open University, Kuwait |

This study endeavors to explore the problems that Translation trainees’ mother culture poses when translating culture-specific idioms. The study used a translation task that comprises 20 culture-specific English idioms which incorporate lexical entities that can have negative connotations in the Arabic culture. The task was distributed to 40 randomly selected translation trainees, senior undergraduate translation students at the Department of Arabic and Translation, College of Languages, Sana’a University. Findings of the study show that the trainees’ mother culture had a considerable impact on the translation process. This impact exhibited itself in many forms, the most prominent of which is the tendency to offer a culturally-driven judgment of the content of the idiom instead of translating the idiom itself. The paper delineates the various forms of cultural interference as seen in the trainees’ renditions of the idioms in the study.

Keywords: culture-specific idioms, mother culture impact, translation, translation trainees, Arabic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Objectives of the study
  • 2.Review of relevant literature
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Subjects
  • 4.Discussion of the findings
    • 4.1Strategies
    • 4.2Impact of the trainees’ culture
    • 4.3Negative influence of the TL culture offering the translator’s assessment of the content of the idiom
    • 4.4Proposing two different translations
    • 4.5Appropriate responses with cultural implication
    • 4.6Negative SL idioms are made more negative in the TL
    • 4.7Positive SL idioms receive negative meaning in TL
    • 4.8Negative SL lexical items made positive
    • 4.9Omitting the negative lexical item from the translation
    • 4.10Impact of the trainees’ culture is obvious even in erroneous renditions
  • 5.Conclusion and implications
  • References
Published online: 20 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.63.4.02sae
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