Critical study on the Arabic translation of the first third of the novel The House of the Spirits

Abstract

In a translation process, several aspects must be taken into consideration; in principle, the preservation of what the author wants to convey to his reader without deviation or alteration. In certain cases, the alteration is necessary in what is related to the cultural diversity between the culture of the author and that of the reader, especially when it comes to avoiding taboo words and expressions by substituting them in euphemisms. Furthermore, there are lexical expressions that are incomprehensible when translated into the target language as they are in the source language. But what we have criticized in this paper are various issues of unjustified or, at least, unnecessary alterations, committed by the translator, which, as can be seen, have greatly affected the author's meaning. Furthermore, it has been noted that the translator has reflected his foreign cultural acquisitions in his translating as French and English vocabulary where it should be limited to Arabic considering the culture of the reader which is Arabic in this work. The translator also altered various grammatical structures and has reversed ideas in which he has not been correct. In this research work we try to make a critical and evaluative review of the first third of the Arabic translation of the novel The house of spirits, the masterpiece of the contemporary Chilean writer Isabel Allende, which is a published by Plaza y Yanés publishing house in (1982) and translated by the syrian doctor and politician Sᾱmī Al-Ŷundī and published by the Dᾱr Al-Ŷundī publishing house (1998).