Translation of socio-cultural expressions: The case of the English translation of Al-Koni’s Nazi:F al-Hajar – the Bleeding of the Stone

Abstract Literary translation has been widely discussed in modern translation studies because it presents diverse problems, including linguistic and cultural aspects so inherent during the translation process. The mistranslation of socio-cultural expressions is one such issue. This study investigates and analyses the techniques used in translating the Arabic socio-cultural expressions that appear in Ibrahim al-Koni’s Nazi:f al-Hajar, which was published in 1992; and its English translation, The Bleeding of the Stone, published in 2002 by May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley. In the study, a comparison between the source text (Arabic) and the target text (English) was undertaken to observe the quality of the translation via adopting House’s (1997) model for translation quality assessment, and thereby identify the techniques being used. Some problems were noted in the translation of Arabic socio-cultural expressions into English. These problems were attributed to the cultural differences between Arabic and English, as evidenced by the unrecognisability of certain socio-cultural expressions in the source language and their nonexistence in the receptor culture, as well as the non-use of certain translation techniques.


Introduction
While translated literature can clearly introduce people to new ways of thinking and improve their ability to understand others, several translators consider literary translation as "the most difficult type of translation" to undertake (Mameri & AlAllaq, 2020, p. 108); consequently, many translators shy away from it (Munday, 2001).Literary translators encounter several challenges.These include linguistic difficulties due to the differences between the linguistic systems of the source language (SL) and the target language (TL).Languages stemming from different ancestors and families can have a significant gap between them, resulting in problems during the translation process.Another major difficulty in literary translation related to cultural specificity.Aziz and Lataiwish (1999, p. 5) claim that "cross-cultural translation may raise a number of problems.The greater the gap between the source and the target cultures, the more serious the difficulty would be".
Historically, as Katan (1999, pp. 16-18) noted, the concept of culture evolved from an early definition offered by the British anthropologist, Edward Burnett Tylor, in 1871.According to Tyler, culture refers to the "complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" (as cited in Katan, 1999, p. 16).In the translation context, Aziz and Lataiwish (1999, p. 4) described culture as "a set of beliefs which governs the behaviour patterns of society.These beliefs include religion, economy, politics, literature and language".This definition has since been broadened to include language as an integral part of the culture, and thus, translation involves two cultures-the culture of the SL (source culture) and that of the TL (target culture).Defining the term socio-cultural can, however, be more difficult because of the following issue: when making a quick review in the literature of social science dissemination, there is no precise definition, but rather a list of decreasing parameters, such as age, sex, employment status, standard of living, purchasing power, the course of life through (not) social mobility, the nature of leisure (in relation to the notion of purchasing power and its more or less cultural aspect), etc. (Quiroz Fragoso et al., 2019, p. 45) Further still, Newmark (1988, pp. 94-103) classifies culture into five different categories: (1) ecology, including animals, plants, local winds, mountains, plains, ice and so on; (2) material culture (artefacts), including food, clothes, housing, transport and communication; (3) social culture, comprising work and leisure; (4) organisations, customs and ideas that are political, social, legal, religious, artistic and so on and, finally, (5) gestures and habits (non-cultural language).
As the gap between two cultures widens, so does the difficulty in performing a literary translation.For instance, the challenges of translating socio-cultural expressions primarily arise because of the differences between the source culture and the target culture.Nida (2000) notes that many basic themes and accounts cannot be naturalised during the process of translation.Similarly, Newmark (1988) has argued that cultural expressions cannot be translated literally.Therefore, cultural categories, which can be expressed using proverbs, collocations, phrasal verbs and metaphors, need special attention during the translation process.Unfortunately, there is still little published data on these specific challenges when undertaking literary translation.Bassnett (2014, p. 119) acknowledged this issue as follows: Although there is a large body of work debating the issues that surround the translation of poetry, far less time has been spent studying the specific problems of translating literary prose.One explanation for this could be the higher status that poetry holds, but it is more probably due to the widespread erroneous notion that a novel is somehow a simpler structure than a poem and consequently easier to translate.This paper aims to address a lacuna in the extant knowledge in the highly problematic area of literary translation-the translatability of socio-cultural expressions that appear in literary prose, namely, novels.This study investigates the difficulties and problems of translating socio-cultural expressions in the Arabic novel ‫ﻧ‬ ‫ﺰ‬ ‫ﻳ‬ ‫ﻒ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﺤ‬ ‫ﺠ‬ ‫ﺮ‬ (Nazi:f al-Hajar) by Ibrahim al-Koni, the highly prolific Libyan novelist and the most translated Arab author, that was published in 1992.The study is based on the novel's English translation by May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley, entitled in English The Bleeding of the Stone and published in 2002.Further, the techniques used for translating sociocultural expressions are examined using Vinay and Darbelnet's (1958/1995modified model. Adopting House's (1997) model of translation quality assessment (TQA), this analysis is undertaken via drawing a comparison between socio-cultural expressions in the source text (ST) and those in the target text (TT), that is, the English translation of the work.(2) What are the techniques used in translating these expressions into English?(3) How effective are the translation techniques that were used?It is hypothesised that some socio-cultural expressions were mistranslated because of the differences between Arabic and English cultures, the non-use of certain translation techniques and the translators' unfamiliarity with certain cultural expressions in the Libyan Tuareg culture.

Literature review
The translation of cultural terms from one language to another is a major area of research in the field of literary translation.Numerous studies have investigated the translation of cultural expressions between English and Arabic.For example, Dweik (2013) conducted a study on translating cultural and literary expressions from English to Arabic.Dweik (2013) viewed culture and translation from different perspectives and investigated the various issues faced by graduate and undergraduate English language majors at the Middle East University in Jordan when translating cultural and lexical expressions like idioms, collocations, metaphors, proverbs, and certain proper nouns from English into Arabic.Twenty male and female students were selected to translate 10 culturebound items within a specific timeframe.The test was designed to collect precise data on how to face cultural difficulties during translation.After administering the test, Dweik interviewed the participants to understand the problems they had faced during the translation process.The study concluded that the students' performance in translating cultural and lexical expressions was poor because of their lack of knowledge of the TL (English) and its culture.
Similarly, Melad (2015) investigated the cultural translation procedures in four novels by Ibrahim Al-Koni (transliterated as al-Kawni in Melad's study) by Arabic-English translators.These novels included: The Bleeding of the Stone, Gold Dust, Anūbīs, and The Seven Veils of Seth.Melad (2015) focused on the style and culture of the source text and how cultural elements were transferred into the target language.He also discussed the difficulty of translating cultural terms, the ways translators dealt with them, and the techniques or strategies that the translators adopted to translate cultural items without losing their original meanings.Melad (2015) used qualitative and quantitative methods for the data analysis and adopted translation equivalence theory as a framework to examine the meaning of cultural terms.He selected 96 translated cultural items and identified many cultural and linguistic problems in their actual translations.The researcher found that providing a synonym of a word or phrase could be the most common translation technique and then a hyperonym.Other techniques could include hyponym, cultural borrowing, transliteration, equivalence, and cultural transplantation.He concluded that the translators deployed different techniques and procedures for translating the specific words or phrases in al-Kawni's novels.Aldawood's (2017) study on the translation of culturally specific elements in literary texts from Arabic into English investigated how translators represent a TL's culture in a translation from Arabic to English.Aldawood (2017) examined , a novel by the Saudi author, Yousef Al-Mohaimeed, and its translation by Anthony Calderbank, entitled Wolves of the Crescent Moon.This particular novel is rich in culturally specific items, so Aldawood (2017) collected 22 examples of culturally specific items taken from the original Arabic book and compared them to their translated version and discussing some of the translation strategies used by Calderbank.Aldawood's (2017) comparison showed that the translator mostly used literal translation or transliteration in addition to favouring foreignization over domestication.Further still, the translator did not use any footnotes; instead, they used a glossary of new terms, including culturally specific elements that the TL reader might not understand so as to give them clearer insight into Saudi culture.Ahmed and Mansour (2021) addressed the strategies used to translate 25 cultural references and expressions in Mourid Barghouti's autobiography, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here from Arabic to English.The authors employed two theoretical models: Venuti's (1998) domestication and foreignization and Ivir's (1987) procedures for the translation of cultural references.Ahmed and Mansour (2021) identified the most common strategies used when translating culturally bound items and the extent to which that translation has considered the original culturally bound elements and their meaning in the TL.Their findings indicate that the domestication strategy (52 percent) was used more than foreignization was used (48 percent).Substitution was used most frequently (seven times), followed by literal translation, and borrowing (six times for each), defining the elements of culture (four times), and omission (twice).The results also showed that lexical creation and additions were not used at all.Ahmed and Mansour (2021) also revealed that the translator successfully managed to convey the original writer's intended meaning in most instances.Zitouni (2022) examined the translation strategies used to render cultural terms in the translation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet from English to Arabic.She also highlighted the challenges faced when translating cultural terms.Zitouni (2022) employed a qualitative approach for analyzing data and adopted Newmark's (1988) model of translation strategies and cultural categories to identify the translation strategies used and classify the cultural terms appeared in that play.Eighteen cultural terms from Romeo and Juliet were selected from the first two chapters, and the translations of these terms were then analyzed.Zitouni (2022) found that the translator utilized the following strategies while translating cultural terms: Functional equivalents, descriptive equivalents, cultural equivalents, shifts or transposition, and naturalization.Some challenges were encountered in translating culturally specific terms because of the cultural differences between Arabic and English.These challenges, as Zitouni (2022, p. 247) concludes, are summarised in the fact that "some cultural terms are rendered literally into the target language. . .[and] some cultural terms are translated using functional strategy.Albeit useful, this translation strategy is not enough to convey the meanings of some cultural words".
The five studies mentioned above have been chronologically ordered and emphasize the importance of using appropriate translation strategies when dealing with culturally bound items that exists between English and Arabic.Their main goal was to identify ways to minimize the gap between the two cultures and thereby provide the closest equivalent meaning in the target culture.The five studies had two different directionalities.Two discussed the strategies used in translating cultural items from English to Arabic, whereas the other three discussed the strategies used in translating cultural items from Arabic to English.Further, the five studies used the corpora of different literary genres.Dweik (2013) used students' translations of texts from different genres, Melad (2015) and Aldawood (2017) used novels, Ahmed and Mansour (2021) used an autobiography, while Zitouni (2022) used a play.
The current study is identical to that of Aldawood's (2017); however, it focuses on the translation of socio-cultural expressions as categorized by Newmark (1988) using a different corpus, a novel written by another writer in another context.It is also identical to Melad's (2015), study, yet more specific, as it is limited to only one novel of Al-Koni's (1992) works; namely Nazi:f al-Hajar "The Bleeding of the Stone".This study is also unique in its adoption of House's (1997) model of translation quality assessment so as to evaluate the translation quality of the selected examples and consequently suggest alternative translations whenever needed.Al-Koni's (1992) novel is examined in this study because Al-Koni is "the most widely translated Arabic novelist today" (McHugh, 2012, p. 288), and Nazi:f al-Hajar "The Bleeding of the Stone" is one of his wellknown novels (Melad, 2015).(Olszok, 2020)., Asouf has had no contact with humans outside his immediate family since birth, and his father taught him that the waddan (mouflon), a type of wild sheep, is the spirit of the mountains of Massak Satfat.Asouf's father, while hunting the animal, finds himself in a perilous situation, hanging between life and death.

A summary of
A waddan rescues and saves him, causing him to vow to never hunt or go near the animal again.However, after years of harsh drought, he has to break his vow and hunt for food.He weeps before doing so, but decides not to teach his son how to hunt.However, he is compelled to change his decision once again; he is convinced that the spirit of the mountains will punish him.Eventually, a waddan kills Asouf's father by breaking his neck, mirroring the fate that he inflicted on the same animal many years before (Al-Hagi, 2008).
Asouf's mother warns him to stay away from the waddan and reminds him of his father's fate.At first, Asouf follows his mother's advice, but eventually he forgets it.He feels a strong compulsion to hunt, without any apparent reason.He thus experiences many dangerous and critical situations, but finally returns safely; thereafter, Asouf decides to stop eating meat.
Two men named Cain and Masoud visit Matkhandoush in Southern Libya to look for the waddan.Asouf, who is the only one with knowledge of the animal's location, but he refuses to give them any information.An argument breaks out between Asouf and Cain.When they return from their search, Asouf makes a sarcastic comment about Cain's desire for raw meat.Cain takes offense and ties Asouf up, dragging him to a rock and killing him by slitting his throat with a knife.This violent and bloody scene ends the novel (Al-Hagi, 2008, pp. 42-45).
Ibrahim al-Koni (sometimes translated as Ibrāhīm Kūnī/Arabic: ) was born in 1948 in the desert of the Tuareg people in Libya's Fezzan region.He learned to read and write Arabic only at the age of 12. Later, Al-Koni went to the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow to study comparative literature and worked as a journalist in Moscow and Warsaw.Since 1993, he has lived in Switzerland and written over 80 books, including novels, short stories, poems, and aphorisms, and all are influenced by the desert (Melad, 2015).His works have been translated into more than 35 languages (McHugh, 2012), including English, German, French, and Russian.Al-Koni has received several awards for his writing, including the Mohamed Zefzaf Prize for the Arabic Novel in 2005 and the Sheikh Zayed Award for Literature in 2008.His novel, The Tumour, was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (2019).

Nazi:f al-Hajar was translated into English in 2002 by May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley as
The Bleeding of the Stone.Jayyusi was born in Amman, Jordan, and completed her studies, including a degree in philosophy, at University College London.Tingley, an English academic and translator of Arabic literature, was born in Brighton.He received his education from the University of London and the University of Leeds.He has worked as a teacher in the UK, Germany, Algeria, Rwanda, and Burkina Faso.He is a noted translator of various classic and modern Arabic literary genres.

Research design
This study utilized quantitative and qualitative data analysis.This combined approach was chosen as it allows for a deeper understanding of the collected data and provides detailed insight into any recurring patterns.

Corpus of the study
The corpus is bilingual, as it includes two texts in two languages.First, the Arabic source text is a novel entitled ‫ﻧ‬ ‫ﺰ‬ ‫ﻳ‬ ‫ﻒ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﺤ‬ ‫ﺠ‬ ‫ﺮ‬ (Nazi:f al-Hajar), written by Al-Koni and published in 1992 by Dar Al Tanweer, a Lebanese publishing house.Second, the novel was translated into English under the title, The Bleeding of the Stone by Tingley and Jayyusi (2002).This translation was published by the American independent publishing house, Interlink Publishing.

Data collection
The data collection process began by reading the printed version of the source text (ST) and manually extracting all socio-cultural expressions found in the first eight chapters of the novel.Then, the target text (TT) was read to extract the translation of the expressions under study.This collected data, including 32 socio-cultural expressions, ware compiled on an Excel sheet.

Data analysis
All the socio-cultural expressions and their translations were classified into five categories using Newmark's (1988) typology of cultural categories.Then, the data were examined further to identify the translation techniques used to translate these expressions by adapting Vinay andDarbelnet's (1958/1995 modified model.According to this model, seven translation strategies are classified into two, direct and oblique.However, three more techniques were added, as they were found to be recurring in the data set.Hence, the direct translation used the following procedures: (1) Borrowing is usually used when there is a semantic gap between the SL and TL; to overcome this issue, new terms are introduced to the TL, to add a foreign flavour to the TT.
(2) Calque is a special kind of borrowing where an expression in the SL is literally translated into the TL.
(3) Literal translation does not refer to a word-for-word translation that is common among transparent languages, but instead to the technique wherein the ST is being transferred to the nearest TL grammatical constructions; however, lexical words are being translated literally out of context.
(4) Transliteration was included under the direct translation, as it was found to be recurring when translating some of the collected socio-cultural expressions.Unlike borrowing, transliteration does not aim to introduce new terms or expand the semantics of the SL.It merely refers to the representation of the text using different orthography.
While the direct strategy is suitable when there are structural and metalinguistic parallelisms between the source language (SL) and target language (TL), the oblique strategy deals with the structural and metalinguistic differences between languages.This oblique strategy includes six procedures: (1) Transposition can be obligatory or optional and refers to the shift in a part of speech or the number from SL to TL where the meaning remains the same, but the surface forms change.
(2) Modulation is a procedure that involves a variation in the form of a message obtained by seeing a shift in the perspective or point of view of the ST.Modulation can be either obligatory or optional.It is likely a common procedure when translating a text from a high context to a low-context culture.
(3) Equivalence is the replacement of a complex figurative ST structure with a functional figurative equivalent in the TL.
(4) Adaptation is used when the ST sociocultural framework does not match the TT sociocultural framework to the extent that connotation would be lost if the symbols were not modified.
(5) Explicitation refers to the presenting of additional information in the TT, which is already implicit in the ST.
(6) Implicitation occurs when a unit in the TT with a general meaning is used.In the current study, omission is also classified under the implicitation technique.
Finally, to study the effectiveness of the techniques used to translate socio-cultural expressions in the TT, House's (1997) TQA model was adopted.TQA concentrates on the relationship between the ST and its translation into the TL.House (2001) acknowledges the subjectivity of the human evaluator; therefore, House (2001) considers the possibility of achieving objectivity that is similar to that used whenever assessing natural science in TQA is farfetched.A significant advantage of House's TQA model (House, 1997) is that it provides a systematic approach for assessing the quality of the translations (Valles 2014: 43).
House's model for "comparative ST-TT analysis is leading to the assessment of the quality of the translation, highlighting mismatches or errors [. ..] through lexical, syntactic, and textual means" (Shakernia, 2014, p. 8).Therefore, implementing House's model requires comparing the ST units to the TT units, and the text is then analysed at three levels: (1) the function of the ST and TT and the examination of the genre, register and tone; (2) an analysis of lexical, syntactic and textual structures/features, and finally, (3) an assessment of the overall quality of the translation.
This study does have limitations in terms of time and scope.It applies only to the second level of House's model, which includes an analysis of lexical, syntactic, and textual means, with a special focus on the lexical element, as socio-cultural expressions are represented mainly at this level.Finally, alternative translations are suggested wherever a mismatch was found.

Data analysis
The socio-cultural expressions extracted from the first eight chapters of the Arabic novel, ‫ﻧ‬ ‫ﺰ‬ ‫ﻳ‬ ‫ﻒ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﺤ‬ ‫ﺠ‬ ‫ﺮ‬ (Nazi:f al-Hajar), were classified using Newmark's Newmark (1988) typology (see Figure 1).The most prevalent cultural category observed in the novel is organizations, customs, and ideas, accounting for 53% of the socio-cultural expressions.This category encompasses numerous religious terms, expressions, and descriptions of religious practices.Ecology is the second most recurring category, comprising 38% of the socio-cultural expressions, and it focuses on local flora, 53% 38% 6% 3% Organisations, customs and ideas Ecology Social culture Material culture fauna, and geographical features specific to Libya, where the novel is set.Social culture represents 6% of the cultural expressions observed and primarily relates to work-related aspects such as traditional occupations, work practices, and social interactions related to employment.Lastly, material culture constitutes 3% of the socio-cultural expressions and encompasses references to household equipment and physical objects mentioned in the novel.
Overall, the data analysis reveals a diverse range of cultural categories within the analyzed chapters of the novel.Although the high occurrence of religious references suggests that religion plays a significant role in the narrative and cultural context portrayed in the text, the remaining categories still provide insights into the natural environment, societal dynamics, and characters' lifestyles depicted in the novel.
The categorized socio-cultural expressions were further analysed and compared with their counterparts in The Bleeding of the Stone to assess how these expressions were translated into English.Figure 2 illustrates the recurrence of the translation techniques adopted by the translators while translating the expressions under the current study.According to the data, it is revealed that out of the total of 32 expressions, 13 were translated using the implicitation technique, making it the most frequently utilized technique.The second most common technique was the literal translation approach, which was used eight times.Following that, the borrowing technique was utilized four times, while transliteration and explicitation techniques were used three and two times, respectively.While this analysis of translation techniques establishes a connection between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT), it is worth noting that there were instances where translators ventured beyond the linguistic and cultural boundaries of the ST to create their own expressions in the TT.Consequently, these cases could not be categorized under any specific translation technique, as new expressions and terms were introduced in the TT.These examples were classified as belonging to an "unspecific" category, and they are discussed further in the following sections.
Finally, having adopted House's (1997) TQA model, the comparison between the ST (Arabic) and the TT (English) involved examining the linguistic and lexical differences or mismatches between the ST and TT.Accordingly, any lexical, syntactic, or textual mismatch between the socio-cultural expressions in the ST and their translation in the TT was considered as unacceptable; alternative translations were suggested where necessary.Throughout the analysis and the comparison, around 53% of the translated expressions included mismatches at the lexical and cultural levels when using implicitation (11 times), literal and unspecific techniques (2 times each), and finally, when using borrowing and transliteration techniques (1 time each).It is also worth mentioning that the translators included a very short glossary (nine terms) at the back of the book to explain foreign words to the target text readers.

Results and discussion
Individual examples of the mismatches between the ST and the TT were listed alongside alternative translations according to the cultural categories of Newmark (1988).In the tables cited below, the numbers next to the texts in brackets indicate the page numbers in the corpora (the original novel and its translation).
(1) Translators must identify the key socio-cultural expressions in the ST and compare them to potential counterparts in the target culture, so that these expressions can be translated without losing the author's intended meaning and thus be conveyed accurately to the target readers.
(2) Translators must use the appropriate translation techniques to translate socio-cultural expressions from Arabic to English.
(3) Co-translators of a literary text should be well versed with the two cultures in question, that is, the culture of the SL and that of the TL; to this end, each translator could belong to the respective culture of the SL and TL.
Although this paper presents interesting observations regarding the translation of cultural expressions in Libyan Arabic, several questions still remain to be answered going forward.Further research is required to ascertain the approach that translators use.Translation research focuses mainly on comparing the ST with the TT and excludes the translators from the study.Translators are only occasionally allowed to provide translation notes or prefaces; however, it is essential to understand their perspectives by interviewing them regarding their decisions.Further, a larger selection of texts that include different Arabic dialects could provide significant results on the most frequently used translation technique(s); subsequently, these findings can be used to improve overall translation pedagogy and training.

Figure
Figure 1.The frequency of cultural categories According to Newmark's (1988) typology.
Figure 2. The frequency of translation technique According to Vinay and Darbelnet's (1958/1995) modified model.

al-Hajar's 'the Bleeding of the Stone'
Nazi:f al-Hajar is divided into 26 chapters.It is set in the desert where the Tuareg people reside.The Tuareg people inhabit the Sahara in Southwest Libya and other African countries, including, Algeria, Niger, and Mali.The story centres on a young Bedouin named Asouf who lives alone in the south Libyan Desert, untouched by modernity.There he tends to his goats, as did his father before him.Asouf's peaceful existence is often disrupted by foreign visitors who are passing through this mysterious and isolated world