Translating Culture-Specific Items in Khairy Shalaby’s “The Time-Travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and Sweets”: A Semiotic Approach

Translating culture-specific items is recognized by translators and translation researchers as a problematic task, particularly when the translator is alien to the source culture. This study aims at analyzing culture-specific items in Cooperson’s translation of Kairy Shalaby’s /raḥalāt ʔalṭoršagi ʔalḥalwagi/ (1991), as “The Time-Travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and Sweets” (2010, 2016). An adapted version of Peirce’s three-dimensional model for semiotranslation (Representamen, Object, and Interpretation), and Dalabastita’s (1993) transformation processes (substitution, repetition, deletion, addition, and permutation) are used to analyze the selected extracts. The analysis is restricted to 10 extracts, containing 27 culture-specific items which are randomly selected from the first four chapters of the novel. These items are in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and carry cultural, historical, and environmental connotations. The results show that out of 27 culture-specific items, the translator fails to deliver the semiotic representation of 15, which may result in the loss of some aspects of the meaning intended by the ST author. It has also been found that the transformation processes that are extensively used by the translator are addition and deletion. These two processes are used to compensate for the absence of a semiotically equivalent sign in the Target language.