Associative Meaning in English Proverbs With their Arabic Equivalents

Abstract

All meanings create associations of some kind or another. Associations, however, are the result of certain specific situations that frame interactions in real social settings. The interpreting ability of the reader and the hearer), hence, depends on his conceptualization of the world around as well as his social and cultural background knowledge which encapsulates different beliefs, attitudes, experience, values, etc. of both source and target languages. Lack of knowledge about these facts poses actual problems in communication if not drawbacks or total failure), including translation.Building on the facts mentioned above, it is hypothesized that the more varied the translator's background knowledge is, the greater is his ability to comprehend and then render proverbs into a target language.This paper concludes that the pragmatic aspects of the language, as well as the context in which a certain proverb is used, reveal different associative meanings of proverbs. Moreover, the main sources of difficulty in translating proverbs, stem from the complexity of the concepts they carry (or are intended to carry), the more difficult the concepts, the more culture dependent the proverbs become and viceversa .