Gaps between Mahfouz’s ‘The Thief and the Dogs’ and its translation by Trevor Le Gassick..

 

Bridging gaps between Mahfouz’s ‘The Thief and the Dogs’ and its translation by Trevor Le Gassick.. Translation theory is the knowledge-based guidelines that show us how to translate metaphors, collocations, groups, clauses, sentences and words in their original contexts, as there are cultural, pragmatic and linguistic aspects we must consider.

 

Bridging the gaps between Mahfouz’s ‘The Thief and the Dogs’ and its translation by Trevor Le Gassick

Translation Considerations 

When we translate a literary work, we must consider the utterance, the situational context or the punctuation marks, as any of these things is equally important in the context. Besides, Translation theory is concerned with minutiae as well as generalities as they are equally important in the context.  (Newmark, A Textbook of Translation, p. 9)

Bridging the gaps between Mahfouz’s textbook of ‘The Thief and the Dogs’ and its translation by Trevor Le Gassick

In fact,we must not separate between translation and pragmatics because the process of translation cannot be perfect or complete without understanding the real intent of the source text. Are the words really ordered in such a way to convey their simple meaning, or they have deeper sense and convey some different message?  So, Skillful and professional literary translators know that both pragmatics and translation utilize a functional view of language and this Functionalism is a mode of explanation by reference to external factors. In pragmatics, “some linguistic feature is motivated by principles outside the scope of linguistic theory.” (Bassnett 1991: 22). (Bahaa-eddin Abulhassan Hassan, 2011, p. 13) 

Now, before moving to the discussion and analysis of the gaps between the literal translation and the implied translation of Mahfouz’s “The Thief and the Dogs”, it is necessary first to outline the theoretical framework of the study. As the implied message is important to understand the text properly and avoid the gaps between the literal and implied translations, we need to study the ST of this novel pragmatically; choosing implicature and presupposition to uncover the real meaning of the source text and propose some alternative solutions to bridge the gaps between Mahfouz’s textbook of ‘The Thief and the Dogs’ and its translation by Trevor Le Gassick, M. M. Badawi and John Redenbeck. And to illustrate some of these gaps, this study will compare this translation with Elyas’s as we explained before.