Journal Article

Problematic Issues Arising in Translating & Interpreting the Cultural Events Into English with Special Emphasis on Janadriyah Festival

Ismail, Al Sayed M. Aly

2015

Overview

The proposed research is dedicated to provide an insight into the problems frequently encountered by the Arab interpreter/translator into English at interpreting/translating the cultural events to be held in Saudi, with special emphasis on Janadriyah Annual Heritage and Cultural Festival. Celebrating Janadriyah Festival aims to disseminate the wide varieties of Saudi heritage and culture to the international world. Communicating the wide varieties of Saudi heritage and culture to the international world, the Arab interpreter/translator may face some strange or vernacular utterances, which are mainly dialectal. On formality scales, the study of dialects may be subsumed under the very broad rubric of vernaculars which come at the bottom of the formality versus informality scale. the bottom of the formality versus informality scale. In most cases, the interpreter is not adequately knowledgeable of the linguistic and cultural features of each single dialect. Accordingly, he/she has to interpret/translate this dialect into Modern Standard Arabic to be rendered into English. Not only does he/she understand the lexical and semantic derivations of the vernacular utterances but also conceive the historical, social, etymological and cultural metamorphosis of these utterances. Therefore, when interpreting/translating a text or a speech derived from a dialect, the interpreter/translator may face two problems: firstly how to understand such dialect and secondly how to reproduce it into English. Previous studies in this problematic area have not addressed how the vernacular language could be interpreted at the cultural events. Instead, they have focused only on employing the intralingual translation approach that provides a translation within one language. The intralingual approach does not explain the mechanism of understanding within the source language. Neither does it deal with the historical changes of meanings over time nor does it tackle the social and cultural elements that shape the meanings of words in language. Consequently, the proposed research will focus on the importance of the cultural translation in line with linguistic analysis for dealing with problems related to translate/ interpret Najd dialect in Janadriyah festival.

• Publisher: رابطة الأدب الحديث
• Subject: الترجمة / السعودية / الفعاليات الثقافية / اللغة الإنجليزية / المهرجانات والاحتفالات / لهجة منطقة نجد