Cultural Consistency in the Literary Translation of the Novel Awlaadu Haaratena

This thesis investigates translators’ practice in translating culture-specific items (CSIs) in literary translation through analyzing, as a case study, the first English translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s most controversial novel Awlaadu Haaratena as Children of Gebelawi by Philip Stewart and its retranslation entitled Children of the Alley by Peter Theroux . The translators’ practice in translating CSIs was examined to determine whether they tend to use domestication or foreignization strategies of translation over time. This was done in order to investigate the validity of the Retranslation Hypothesis (RH) – the claim that “first translations of the literary text are more domesticating than the later retranslations of the same text” (Bensimon, 1990: ix). For this purpose, CSIs were first identified and classified based on Larson’s (1984: 431) and Baker’s (1992: 21) classification of cultural categories: clothes, food, terms of address (honorific titles which precede names; they are words that convey esteem or respect and are used when addressing or referring to a person), religious expressions, common expressions, activities, habits ,and others. Secondly, each item is examined to identify which one of Ivir’s (1987) strategies was applied in its translation. Thirdly, the number of occurrences for each strategy is calculated and then grouped under Venuti’s (1995) model of foreignization versus domestication. After that, the percentage of foreignization strategies, compared to those of domestication, is calculated for each translation. The findings of this study support the RH; they show that Philip Stewart (1981) applied domestication more than Peter Thoroux (1999) whose translation is more culturally consistent and closer to the original novel. The findings also demonstrate that retranslation responds to and is shaped by the socio-cultural forces of the literary field.