Domestication Versus Foreignization: The case of translating Al-Sanea’s Girls of Riyadh into English

Abstract

This paper aims to shed more insights onto the relationship between ideology and literary translation through analyzing and exposing scandalous stories of girls of Riyadh in Al-Sanea’s novel (2005) and its English translation (2007). It tackles how the idea of over-domestication could manipulate the source text and sometimes change its core message for commercial and ideological reasons. It addresses the following question: how (un)faithful is the published English translation of Al-Sanea’s Girls of Riyadh to the original Arabic text in terms of evoking the same conceptual frames and maintaining the same lexico-grammatical relations. A frame-based cognitive analysis is used as the methodology of the study. Results show that the author, publisher, translator and pro-translator scholars enacted disgraceful situations which can be attributed to subjective desirability.