Domestication Versus Foreignization: The case of translating Al-Sanea’s Girls of Riyadh into English

Abstract:

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This paper aims to shed more insights onto the relationship between ideology and literary translation through analyzing and exposing scandalous stories of girls of Riyadh in Al-Sanea’s novel (2005) and its English translation (2007). It tackles how the idea of over-domestication could manipulate the source text and sometimes change its core message for commercial and ideological reasons. It addresses the following question: how (un)faithful is the published English translation of Al-Sanea’s Girls of Riyadh  to the original Arabic text in terms of evoking the same conceptual frames and maintaining the same lexico-grammatical relations.  A frame-based cognitive analysis is used as the methodology of the study. Results show that the author, publisher, translator and pro-translator scholars enacted disgraceful situations which can be attributed to subjective desirability.