An Emic-Etic approach to the rendition of emotiveness in Mourid Barghouti’s autobiography: As an intercultural communication encounter

Abstract

There is always some aspect of meaning which appears to be difficult to capture and transmit to the target culture (TC) and it happens to be as important as any other denotative aspects. The primary purpose of this study is to account for the cultural losses resulting from overlooking “the translatability of emotiveness” in an autobiography titled I Saw Ramallah. This study underlies the problems which have resulted form not acting as a cultural insider in both the source and target cultures and relying on a specific translation strategy which did not take into account such emotive aspects of countless culture-bound expressions (CBEs): over-looking the rendition of emotive or culture-bound expressions constitutes an intercultural translation impediment for the target language (TL) readers. The corpus consists of a thorough analysis of excerpts from the autobiography of I Saw Ramallah with reference to the application of Kenneth Pike’s concept of “etic” and “emic” approach to translation.

Keywords

• stylistics
• semantic & pragmatic losses
• the translatability of emotiveness
• intercultural communication impediment
• etic & emic approach