Bridging Emic and Etic Readings: Idiom Translation Strategies in Yusuf Idris's The Cheapest Nights

This study is an attempt to approach the translation of idiomatic expression in some of Yusuf Idris's short stories into English language from an emic-etic perspective. This study aims to investigate if the translator (a native Egyptian-Arabic speaker) succeeded or failed to represent the cultural implications of this category of culture-specific expressions, namely idiomatic expressions. A descriptive, comparative analytical approach is used to figure out the cultural meanings conveyed or lost in the ST. The idioms and their translations are tabulated along with translation strategies utilized to get insight into what strategies were suitable so far as cultural meanings of idioms are concerned. The results of the study showed that the translator succeeded to represent the deep-structure meaning (the communicative meaning) of 14 out of 19 idioms, but failed to account for their surface-structure emics, which are insignificant in a communication process but imbued with cultural connotations like anecdotic, historic meanings or community worldviews. The translation strategies of adaptation and paraphrasing proved useful in rendering communicative meanings; culture-related surface-structure meanings (surface-structure culturemes) remained in the dark corner. The other five expressions in the data are omitted in the TT.