Rendering Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) in Translating Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman From English Into Arabic
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1605.06Keywords:
culture-specific items (CSIs), translation studies, Anglophone African Literature, challenges, proceduresAbstract
This paper examines the process of translating culture-specific items (CSIs) from English into Arabic in the Nigerian play Death and the King’s Horseman by the Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka. Anglophone African literary texts, particularly those rooted in indigenous belief systems and oral traditions, present unique challenges for translators due to their dense cultural and linguistic layers. Research on English–Arabic translation has largely centered on Western texts, while Anglophone African literature remains underexplored despite its distinct hybrid linguistic and cultural features. This study advances the field by examining the translation of CSIs in Nigerian literature as a double transposition process (Bandia, 1993). This study draws on Nida’s (1964) cultural categorization, Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1995) translation procedures, and Venuti’s (1995) concepts of domestication and foreignization. Through a descriptive and comparative analysis of representative CSIs, including ecological, material, social, religious, and linguistic categories, this research explores the translation problems encountered, the procedures employed, and the translator’s orientation. The findings reveal that religious and social CSIs are most prevalent, often leading to untranslatability and semantic loss. The translator employed a variety of procedures with a strong tendency toward domestication, while still preserving culturally significant foreign elements to sustain original cultural flavor. Moreover, the paper concludes that translating African literary texts into Arabic involves complex negotiations between cultural adequacy and reader accessibility. This study contributes to the field of translation studies of Anglophone African literature by shedding light on how cultural and linguistic asymmetries are negotiated in Arabic translations, offering practical insights for cross-cultural translation practice.
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