Textual Deformation in Translating Literature: An Arabic Version of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

This corpus-based paper discusses the validity and implications of a literal approach in the translation of Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart into Arabic. Like other writers from continental Africa, Chinua Achebe often sought to encode elements of his tribal heritage (in this case Igbo), using explicit textual markers, widely called culture-bound signifiers, and implicit contextual semiotic units or ‘culturemes’. The present analysis focuses on examples which reveal that the translator’s decision to stay close to the surface of the source text often caused a failure in translation to decode adequately the source units and effectively re-encode them into Arabic. Different types of ST deformation are detected, categorized, and described, with alternatives often suggested for improvement. At the theoretical level, the paper suggests that Berman’s ‘negative analytic’ should not be understood as being necessarily conducive to domestication of the source text; nor should the continuum ‘domestication/foreignization’ be understood as a binary opposition. In fact, nothing in the translation under discussion confirms that the translator is positioned as a co-writer or even as an invisible mediator between two languages and cultures. The paper concludes that, to achieve optimality, literary translators should not only be familiar with both cultures and languages, but also with what has been written on translation as a process and end-product.