| المستخلص: |
The present paper is an attempt to evaluate the translation of Naguib Mahfouz's Zuqaq Al-Midaqq by Trevor Le Gassick as Midaq Alley. It consists of an introduction, two main sections and a conclusion. The introduction is a quick review of literature that discusses formal, cultural and narratological problems in literary translation, and draws attention to the causes of the difficulty of translating the source text under scrutiny. The first main section shows that the problems that the target text under scrutiny suffers from are mainly formal, cultural, and historical, e.g. inability to observe phrase and sentence structure, to incorporate historical concepts, to render religious invocations of Deity, or to define connotational lexemes. It also shows that discoursal and rhetorical problems are innumerable, e.g. fragmenting long paragraphs and complex sentences, inability to. distinguish main from subordinate clauses, conjoining unrelated clauses and breaking the relationship between related ones, conjoining non-parallel structures, and introducing non-existent cause/effiect relationships. The second main section is a discussion of the narratological hindrances in the target text and of the extent to which it is equivalent to or different from the source text.It shows that the translator has not been able to distinguish the narrative report frame, marked with past tense verbs, from the indirect speech, free indirect speech, and interior monologue style shifts, marked with present tense verbs, deictic place and time adverbs and demonstratives, interrogative and exclamatory structures, and subtle ellipsis of reporting clauses. Neither has he been able to cope with the frequent shifts into and away from different narration styles. The paper finally proposes that further research on the translation of Arabic literary works seems desirable since it helps minimize cultural barriers among different nations. \
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