Cultural Implications of Some Concepts of Direction in English and Arabic with Reference to English - Arabic - English Translation

Abstract

Cultural differences between speech communities very often pose difficulties in conveying the different messages including those falling into the domain of human language proper. This is very obvious when one fails to recognize the expected response from a foreigner on hearing some culture-bound expression or other. It is also felt when a translator may fail to find in the target language (TL) an expression corresponding to that of the source language (SL). This manifestly shows that translation is not, as some may believe, merely the rendering of syntactic and semantic structures of the SL into the TL's corresponding structures.The aim of the present paper is to shed light on some cultural aspects related to certain concepts of direction in both Arabic and English and to discuss points of similarity and difference between them. It also studies the difficulties encountered in the process of translating from one of these languages into the other as far as some directional expressions are concerned. Attention is to be drawn that the examples cited in the paper cover diverse topics and range from the highly literary to the very informal. The main directional expressions to be investigated here are those of UP-DOWN/ اسفل (تحت) – أعلى (فوق) and Right-Left/ یسار (شمال) / یمین