Translating Arabians in early twentieth century European travel writing

Abstract Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach borrowed from translation, cultural writing, and travel writing studies, this research has investigated semantic shifts in Yousef Noor Awad’s Arabic translation (1991) of The Lord of Arabia: Ibn Saud: An Intimate Study of a King , a British travel account by Harold Courtenay Armstrong (1934) . Situating the two texts within a cultural and historical “continuum” ( Bassnett and Trivedy 1999 , 2), the study has explored how Armstrong’s English travel account, characterized by both sympathetic biographical portrayals of King Abdul-Aziz and stereotypical depictions of Arabian culture, is transformed in translation. For this, two complementary questions were addressed: (1) How are Arabians and their culture represented in the source text? and (2) How does the target text reflect or alter these representations? By quantifying and analyzing selected semantic shifts, modifications, and omissions in Awad’s translation, the study reveals how the translator domesticates the source text (ST) to align it with his ideological preferences of an idealized leadership. The findings highlight the interplay between translation, ideology, and cultural representation, and underscore Awad’s translational choices. The latter are found to diverge from Armstrong’s ethnographic inaccuracies, yet perpetuate a different form of cultural bias that further complicates the issue of cross-cultural representations ( Armstrong 1991 ).