Comparative Text Analysis of the Arabic Translations of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Abstract

As the self-help literature books are increasing in our day and time, and they are spreading all over the world as well as the Arabic world. We must take a look back to the translated work in this genre to develop future work in this field. In this research, I analyse and discuss two of the Arabic translations of the international best seller The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. In this novel, there are many of spiritual, religious, and self-help terminologies that could be considered unfamiliar in the Arabic world. I discuss in this research the translators work through three angles, shift theory, the relevance theory, and through the domestication and fornication approaches used in their work. Aiming that by the end of the analysis, I could define which approaches the translators fulfilled rendering the ST into the TT readers and which approaches they did not fulfil it.