An Assessment of Strategies Adopted in Translating Selected Chapters of Atwans's Memoir: “A Country of Words” into Arabic

Abstract

This study explored the strategies adopted in translating selected chapters from Abdelbari Atwan's political memoir A Country of Words by Husam Al-Din Mohammad. Back translation was used as a method. That is, an Arab Palestinian refugee endeavors to interpret his thoughts and transfer his experience of the Arabic culture to English as a SLT, and then the translator transfers those thoughts back into the original Arabic language as a TLT. The translation is analyzed in terms of its cultural, religious and political orientations endorsed by the researcher who seeks to identify and analyze the main problematic outcomes of the translation by means of observing the contextual and cultural concordance of the two texts. The analysis attempts to figure out if the translation retains the pragmatic and semantic orientation of each expression, the problems that the translator comes across in the process of translation, and the strategic issues adopted by the translator to retain the functional-equivalence of each expression. The study concluded that the strategies enable both the writer and the translator to preserve the Arabic language, which is the essence and the distinguishing feature of the Arabic culture. Atwan, as a bilingual writer, captured the Arabic aesthetic taste in his original text by preserving the Arabic cultural content and form in the original text.