The Explicitation in Gender-specific Pronouns in Mohammad Reza Maraashipour's Translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s Novel "Al-Tariq" (‘The Road’)

Abstract

Differences between the structures of languages are one of the problems with which translators are faced; one of these structural differences is gender-specific pronouns in the Arabic language and lack of them in Persian. This problem puts the translator in such a situation that if he is going to translate each pronoun in Arabic (source) with a pronoun in the Persian (target), confusion will rise. These ambiguities prevent the translation to do its basic functioning. Translation studies scholars have mentioned universal features of translated texts. We can mention "explicitation" as one of these features that means adding information in the "translated text" that is not found in the "source text". This research seeks to investigate the functioning of "explicitation" in the translations of Arabic novels and to display its role in translating gender-specific pronouns (male and female) to prevent confusion in the translation of pronouns between the two languages because of the difference between them. Inthis waya novel entitled "Al-Tariq" (‘TheRoad’) written by Naguib Mahfouz and translated by Mohammad RezaMaraashipourunder the title "Rah", has beenchosenas thecase study. Toachieve thisobjective we have used the quantitativeanalysis method.

Keywords

• translation universals
• explicitation
• gender-specific pronouns
• al-tariq
• rah