Strategies Used in Arabic-English Translation of Idioms in Samiha Krais’s Novel Al Qurmiya

Abstract

This article aims at exploring the translation strategies adopted in translating from Arabic into English the idiomatic expressions found in Al Qurmiya, a historical novel by the Jordanian writer Samiha Krais (1998/2011). Fifty-five idioms in the Arabic text have been selected and compared with their counterparts in the English text with the aim of finding out how they have been translated. Applying Mona Baker’s (2018) idioms translation model, the researcher examines the translation strategies employed in the translated version The Tree Stump by Nesreen Akhtarkhavari (2019) and analyzes the extent of their effective transference of the meanings of the selected idioms from the source language into the target language. Results show that the strategies applied in the translation are similar to those in Baker’s model and that paraphrasing is the most frequently used strategy followed by the strategy of “using an idiom of similar meaning but dissimilar form”.