Translation Strategies for Dialect and Colloquialism in Postcolonial Arabic Literature

Abstract

This paper examines how dialect and colloquial expression are rendered in postcolonial Arabic fiction through a close comparative study of Ibrahim Nasrallah's The Time of White Horses and Nancy Roberts's English translation. It analyzes selected instances of rural speech, blessings, insults, exclamations, kinship terms, and other culturally embedded colloquial formulas that constitute the novel's Palestinian social and cultural voice. Using a qualitative descriptive-comparative approach, the study draws on Baker's translation strategies, Venuti's domestication and foreignization framework, and scholarship on Arabic diglossia, literary register, and translation loss to assess how meaning, and what is lost with it, moves across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The analysis finds that Roberts's translation generally preserves the propositional content of the source text but frequently normalizes dialectal features, softens colloquial intensity, or substitutes locally marked expressions with more accessible standard English, even as select passages achieve genuinely idiomatic solutions that retain pragmatic force, narrative rhythm, and reader accessibility simultaneously. These findings support the paper's central argument: translating dialect and colloquialism in postcolonial Arabic fiction is not a lexical or syntactic problem alone but a culturally consequential process bearing directly on voice, identity, and literary representation. The study concludes that effective rendering of colloquial speech depends on a deliberate balance between readability and the preservation of local texture, social nuance, and the cultural distinctiveness of the source world, a balance current translation practice achieves only unevenly.