Translating Arabic Kuwaiti Proverbs into English: A Semiotic Perspective.

The present analytical comparative study aims to investigate the semiotic meaning of some Arabic Kuwaiti proverbs and their equivalents in English. Besides, it explores translation strategies that have been employed in rendering those proverbs semiotically. The problem of the study arises from the difficulty in interpreting the semiotic signs of Kuwaiti proverbs and finding a suitable equivalent within the scope of translation from Arabic into English. The importance of the study emanates from its interdisciplinary nature––incorporating semiotics into translation. The corpus comprises fifteen Arabic Kuwaiti proverbs and their suggested equivalents in English. The source language proverbs have been quoted from Hamad Alsauaedan's (1992) The Kuwaiti Encyclopedia. The study adopts Peirce's (1931) Interpretive Model of Semiotics and Farghal and Almanna's (2015) strategies for translating semiotic signs. The findings of the study have indicated that Peirce's triadic model can apply not only to English but also to the Arabic Kuwaiti dialect. In addition, it is possible to modify the 'object' and the 'representamen' in the target language without affecting the source language's semiotic meaning. All the chosen proverbs were rendered functionally into English from a semiotic perspective. Using an idiomatic expression to render a Kuwaiti proverb into English semiotically is probable. Literal translation seems to be an acceptable method if the SL proverb and the TL proverb share a universal content. Accordingly, the study recommends translation students, practitioners, and other researchers explore other equivalent English proverbs that could express the same semiotic meaning in the Kuwaiti dialect.