Translation Problems Between English and Arabic

Translation as a paradigm of cultural contact is not as clear a concept as it might seem to be. In the last 30 years, the field has expanded considerably towards a macro-level, encompassing the cultural context as a whole. Most recent theories in social linguistics raise the question of intercultural translation; they mean hermeneutic issues rather than the problems of faithfulness. Consequently, the translator is both a text receiver and a text producer who should first read and comprehend the Source Language Text then convey it equivalently into the Target Language Text. However, theorists find out that there is always a cultural gap between the source language and the target language that sometimes influences the emotiveness of the TL text. This paper is concerned with the cultural hindrances in Arabic-English translation. Moreover, it investigates examples to emphasize the fact that intercultural translation can help people understand better the alien cultural elements as long as competent translators keep trying to overcome these hindrances. Thus, the translator has to be both bilingual and bicultural to preserve the emotiveness of the SL text and create a natural text in the TL.