The Strategies of Translating Cultural-Bound Expressions in Mourid Barghouti’s Autobiography “<i>I Was Born There, I Was Born Here</i>”

Abstract

I Was Born There, I Was Born Here is an autobiography of Mourid Barghouti, an honest and patriot Palestinian poet and writer, considered a classical memoir; it takes up the story of Barghouti’s return to Palestine with his son, Tamim. On the other hand, it takes up some interesting stories about his Homeland and his small village. Barghouti also deals with many issues related to corruption in Arab regimes, including Palestinian Authorities. Humphrey Davis a British translator of Arabic fiction translated the book in 2011 his sensitive translation is full of life and humor. This paper investigates and analyzes the translation of this book with specific reference to cultural-bound terms and concepts since the translator is a foreign one. It highlights the strategies of translating such expressions and the types of equivalence used to translate them. The researcher uses qualitative, analyzing and descriptive methodology to find out the obsticles of translating an Arabic text by a foreign translator and how does he deal with the cultural terms and concepts. The findings of this research reveal that translating autobiographical text is problematic and challenging. On the one hand, the researcher finds that the translator mainly uses three strategies: cultural borrowing, semantic translation, communicative translation in translating most of the figurative expressions. On the other hand, the translator uses communicative, modulation, literal and cultural substitution to translate some terms that don’t have an equivalence in the target language.