الفهرس 
Title: Culture-specificity : As a problem of translation in the English versions of some of Gamal Al-Ghitani’s novels & short stories
Table of ContentsOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 151 |  |  |
| | | from | 151 | | |
Abstract
This dissertation examines the crucial shift of emphasis from the purely linguistically oriented approach to translation to the culturally oriented one. It also thrusts into focus the strategies and tools adopted by the translator to fill in the void emanating from the cultural discrepancies existing between the Arab and English cultures. The study undertakes to weigh up the merits and demerits of the strategies of omission, footnoting, interpolation, and glossing in an attempt to arrive at a reasoned strategy that ensures the incorporation of culture-specific elements without sustaining a potential loss of meaning. Much emphasis is also placed on the strategies of cultural transference in order to gauge the varying degrees of communicativeness, bearing in mind the attempt to impart the flavour of the Egyptian culture. The strategies are analyzed from a Skopos-based perspective, that is, according to the Skopos set by the commissioner of translation. The importance of the translator’s competence is also underlined as a decisive factor in the cultural transference process. The dissertation also undertakes to analyze Peter Newmark’s approaches to translation: the semantic versus the communicative approaches and Eugene Nida’s two types of equivalence. A comparison is held between these two approaches and equivalence types in an attempt to outline the merits and demerits of each of them with regard to the representation of the source culture in the target text. The functional approach ,which draws upon the Skopos theory put forth by Hans Vermeer in 1989, figures prominently in this study as it provides an escape route from semantic versus communicative axis as well as Nida’s two types of equivalence, for it makes the function of the translation the guiding principle upon the form