Culture as a Problem in the Translation of Jordanian Proverbs into English

Abstract

The study aims at identifying the cultural problems, encountered in the translation of Jordanian proverbs into English. The significance of the study stems from the fact that it stresses on the social, colloquial, and folkloric use of proverbs that adds to the various implications of them. It relies on the selection of proverbs that are used and understood in different regions of Jordan. They address different social and cultural issues, and this makes indispensible the relationship between Jordanians and their cultural and social values. The conventions of the proverbs reflect their historical background, and the actual incidents or events that have led to their formation, utterance, currency, and frequency. The whole proverbial context has been pivotally and elementally noticed in proverbs' construction, and this fact enhances both the utterer and the audience in the comprehension of the proverb. Translating the selected proverbs into English collides with many challenges, of which the cultural ones are observed as the most manifest. What adds to the translation challenges is the colloquialism of the proverbs, which gives them enough semantic, social, and cultural values that cannot be stripped or ignored in the literal translation of the proverbs.

Translating Proverbs in The Gulistan of Sa‘di: Developing a New Taxonomy Based on Baker’s (2011) Model

“…It seems sensible to claim that the majority of ST proverbs sound familiar to a large number of people who live in the same socio-cultural community. Proverbs exist in almost all literary works and are sometimes considered a challenge for translators (Al-Azzam, 2018;Ismaili 2018).…”