Examining the Retranslation Hypothesis in the Arabic Translations of Lady Chatterley’s

Abstract

The retranslation hypothesis developed by Antoine Berman and Paul Bensimon, which entails initial translations being domesticated and retranslations being foreignised, has been studied multiple times. However, in the case of English-Arabic translations, the hypothesis has not yet been fully examined. The aim of this thesis is to question the validity of the retranslation hypothesis when applied to the two Arabic translations of Lady Chatterley's Lover. To test the validity of the retranslation hypothesis, the two Arabic translations underwent two types of analysis. The quantitative analysis presents general information about all corpora, the Source Text (ST), translation 1 (T1) and translation 2 (T2). Such information helps in knowing the word count, lexical density and word frequencies, among other features that assist in forming a general view about the macro translation strategies applied in the Arabic translations. The qualitative analysis focuses on the three most challenging characteristics found in the ST: metaphor, explicit language and language variety. The analysis of these characteristics considers the use of the micro translation strategies utilised in each translation to overcome such challenges. In addition, the qualitative analysis sheds light on one aspect of the Arabic translations: the use of footnotes. All of this information, ranging from quantitative to qualitative, lead to a conclusion about the validity of the retranslation hypothesis. The results of both analyses proved that the two Arabic translations do not fully conform to the retranslation hypothesis.