An analytical study of some aspects of literary translation: two Arabic translations of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea

To our best knowledge this is the first attempt to investigate translation of the stylistic features involved in an interesting masterpiece of American literature, The Old Man and the Sea, written by Ernest Hemingway. This story has been translated into Arabic twice, first by Munir Ba'labaki and second by Dr Ziad Zakariyya. This thesis attempts to explore problems of literary translation from English into Arabic. It seeks to investigate some aspects of culture and style in The Old Man and the Sea and the two Arabic translations. The aim is to assess how much of the style and culture of the original has been preserved. It is also concerned with the problem of equivalence and translation units, since equivalence is considered the tool for detailed comparison. Chapter One deals with various approaches to evaluation of translation. This is done by reviewing a number of notions which have dominated the field of translation for a long time. One school believes that the act of translation is an art and that evaluation is limited to the aesthetic values of a literary work and depends largely on the critic's subjective decisions. Its objective is to provide a list of rules for the translator to follow in order to arrive at a translation of optimal value. The other school approaches translation as a linguistic operation and considers that a translation should be judged objectively, according to a linguistic analysis based on equivalence of the ST and the TT. Proponents of this view have developed models for evaluating. These models are addressed. Chapter Two is concerned with a review of certain concepts which are fundamental to literary translation. It attempts to highlight the theoretical approaches to the notion of 'equivalence', such as formal vs. dynamic and semantic vs. communicative equivalence, and different approaches to the question of translation units