Translating Literary Texts Between Cultural Aspect and the Recipient’s Importance

The Big House by Muhamed DIB as Case Study

Abstract

This research paper is based on the translation of the literary text between the cultural dimension
and the importance of the recipient. Since the history of translation studies has witnessed the three
prominent turns, the cultural and social dimension has become the pillar of each translational
activity, as the translator cannot proceed without returning to these two dimensions in order to
obtain a translation that balances the basic elements of both the source text and the target text,
including the linguistic and cultural elements. Through this intervention, we aim to highlight some
of the concepts that are relevant to the field of our research, such as receiving translations in the
target social culture and the difference between taking this element into account and ignoring it.
That is why our study is divided as follows: The theoretical aspect of its concepts and everything
related to it in order to avoid any form of wrong practice on the reality of the cultural and social
dimension for the target recipient, especially since the translation of a literary text is one of the
most difficult types of translation that requires the translator’s high skills. As for the practical
aspect of the study, it relies on the comparative descriptive approach of literary texts translation
reality under the sociological turn of translation studies. We will highlight the examples that we
will extract from Mohamed Dib’s novel and analyze them to reach the results of this recent shift
in the translation field and answer its main problem: What is the element of receiving translations
in the target social culture? What are the difficulties of translating the literary text between the
cultural dimension and the target recipient?