The Challenge of Transfering The Cultural Dimension in the Literary Translation ‘’The Old Man and the Sea as example’’

Abstract

Literary translation has always taken an important place in translation studies and has attracted
the interest of researchers and scholars in the field. The cultural element transferfrom one language
to another in the narrative domain presents many problems. We try to highlight it through this
paper. Based on a corpus of multiple translations of Ernest Hemingway's novel "The Old Man and
the Sea" into Arabic. The novel contains many cultural references, especially those spoken by
Santiago. Thus, We will try to answer the following questions:
- What strategies and techniques exist to transfer religious elements from English to Arabic in the
context of literary translation?
- What are the most important difficulties and problems facing a literary translator when
transferring a literary work into Arabic? With particular emphasis on cultural elements.
- Does the translator's background and cultural environment influence his translation choices
when dealing with cultural elements?
To answer these questions, we will study multiple examples of different translations of the novel:
Through the diversity andthe plurality of backgrounds among translators, we try to draw the most
important differences between translations and each translator's way of dealing with every cultural
element, healing the purpose of adopting one method of translation rather than another.