Strategies for Translating English Colour-Related Idioms into Arabic

This paper is to focus on the translation of English colour-related idioms as culture-specific expressions and is to question the validity of the notions of foreignisation and domestication brought to the fore of translation studies by Venuti (1995). However, it is not intended here to question the quality of Venuti’s advocacy of foreignising translation, but rather to apply the notions of foreignisation, domestication, mainly paraphrase as a conceptual framework for the translation of idioms as a case of cultural transfer. This will be done by providing translations and analysing already existing translations of a number of English colour-related idioms.
More particularly, this paper will examine whether it is possible to observe any form of consistency in the strategies used for the translation of such culturally-bound expressions. This paper is an attempt to suggest strategies for the translation of such cultural expressions, e.g. foreignisation, domestication, and paraphrase (a domestication-biased strategy). This study is to be more descriptive than prescriptive; it will describe already existing translations in order to make generalisations about translation methods. Such generalisations may be taken as guidelines for the translation of English colour-related idioms.
This study will answer the following questions: Which strategy is more appropriate as far as colour-related idiomatic expressions are concerned? Which strategy can help the translated idiom has its intended effect in the target language? Can domestication and foreignisation complement each other? Are there situations where foreignisation is more appropriate, and vice versa? And are there situations where paraphrase is preferable and why?
Methodology and Methods of Data Collection and Data Analysis
This paper offers a descriptive content analysis of colour-related idioms as culture expressions. It is intended to examine and propose ways of translating English colour-related idioms. More specifically, it will contrast the application of the foreignisation and domestication strategies to the translation of such culturally-bound expressions. To this end, this paper will make use of many theories, concepts and previous studies. The study will use as its tools the linguistic relativity hypothesis introduced by the anthropologist Edward Sapir and his colleague and student Benjamin Whorf. The principle of translation equivalence, Skopos theory, and characteristics of idioms, are all to be used as methods of analysis.
The corpus data required for this study will consist of a list of English colour-related idioms collected mainly from the Cambridge International Dictionary of English, Oxford English Dictionary and AL-Mawrid English Dictionary.
The proposed paper will employ the two modes of translation distinguished by Venuti (1995), foreignisation and domestication. The former is a parallel word-for-word translation that aims at rendering the form of the SL into the TL and the latter is a sentential translation that aims at conveying the meaning of the SL rather than the form. As pointed out earlier, the theoretical framework will make use of the skopos theory, which incorporates strategies ranging from the most literal (foreignising) to the freest (domesticating). paraphrase will be also discussed with reference to the translation of idioms. The key features of idioms as culture-specific expressions will be explained in terms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with special reference to colour terms. In addition, the principle of translation equivalence and the work of Berlin and Kay on colour language differences among cultures will be utilised.
Conclusion and Recommendations
As a background for the whole argument, the relation between translation and culture was highlighted to show how cultural differences affect translation. Language and culture are in a mutually influential relationship, so the cultural dimension is very significant when two languages are involved in any type of interaction. Colours, as a cultural aspect, were used as examples to conclude that different translation strategies should be adopted in the process of translating between two distant cultures.
This study argues that the field of translation studies should not be rent by dichotomies of the nature of domestication and foreignisation. The difficulty of translating culturally-bound expression as colour-related idioms lies in the fact that they can be quite different across cultures and languages. So that, the field of translation studies should exert efforts to enhancing the performance of translators in order to bolster inter-cultural communication and the ability to appreciate diversity. This conviction is borne out by the argument raised in this paper about the interrelationship between language, culture and translation.
In a nutshell, it can be inferred from this study that domestication strategies, including paraphrasing and translation using equivalents, and foreignised translations complement each other. Moreover, translation by paraphrase is one of the possible ways in coping with problematic items in translation. “Paraphrase” could be recommended as a powerful tool to be adopted in translating different fields of knowledge simply because it can achieve a high level of precision in specifying the meaning of an expression or a concept that poses difficulties in translation.