American Fiction and Cultural Transfer: An Arabic Perspective to Alan Lightman, Ernest Hemingway, and Mark Twain

Abstract

Our article deals with the complexities of the process of reception of American fiction in the Arab world, viewed as cultural transfer, closely related with the circulation of knowledge between the Arab countries and the Western world, in which the Arabic rendering mediates between cultures by a process of interpretation and paraphrasing of the text in the sourcelanguage. We carefully consider the process of Arabization, and the strategies of domestication and foreignization as defined by Lawrence Venuti. Ample space is devoted to the contributions of two emblematic translators from English into Arabic: dr. Ali Al-Qasimi and his theory of translation as naturalization, and Ihsan Abbas. The practical examples have been chosen from the Arabic renderings of Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Keywords

• Al-Qasimi
• Arabic
• Arabization
• cultural transfer
• domestication
• foreignization