Translating Arabic allusions into English

Abstract This article analyzes the translation of Key-Phrase (KP) allusions in the short story collection “ al-‘Abarāt ” by Al-Manfaluti from Arabic to English. More specifically, it looks into how the translator handled the complexity that arises from the highly intertextual and dialogical nature of Al-Manfaluti’s work. Drawing on Leppihalme’s (1997) categorization of allusions and Venuti’s (2009) approach to the translation of intertextuality, this research maps the translation strategies that the translator employed and their effectiveness in the course of reconstituting source text intertextuality in the target language. The results showed that, by and large, the translator very often employed a literal translation strategy by focusing on semantic correspondence. Such an approach produced a translation that failed to capture the rich intertextual relations in Al-Manfaluti’s original, leading to much cultural and thematic loss. The article concludes that a hermeneutic rather than an instrumental approach would be more effective at preserving the intertextual richness of source texts.