The Translation of Culture-bound Elements from Arabic into English in Ibn Khaldun’s Masterpiece: Domestication and Foreignization Approach

Abstract

This study is a descriptive and interdisciplinary work whose main aim is to explore the translation strategies that translators use in translating cultural-bound elements (CBEs) from Arabic into English. Being strongly and deeply rooted in their culture, CBEs, in many cases, do not have equivalents in target languages and cultures. Thus, this constitutes one of the most difficult problems that translators meet in the process of rendition. The corpus of the study is picked from the well-known Arabic sociological ouevre “The Muqaddimah”, written by the Ibn Khaldun and translated by Translated by Franz Rosenthal. The study dwells on the methods, approaches, procedures and strategies that translators, in general, and the translator of “The Muqaddimah”, in particular, makes use of in dealing with these CBEs. Within the same line of thought, the study differentiates global from local strategies and introduces Venuti‘s concepts of domesticating and foreignizing translation strategies, which he mentioned in his masterpiece “The Translator’s Invisibility”, a book that calls to raise awareness of translation and acknowledgement to the translators. Foreignization, the study proves, is widely used in the translation of CBEs in the selected text because it maintains the identity of the source text, supports the target reader with cultural information of the source text and enhances cultural understanding among nations and cultures.