Translating English Color Idioms into Arabic

Color idioms, a special category of idioms, cannot be translationally approached without deep and ‘voracious’ cultural insight that goes beyond the transmittal of linguistic structure and a very parochial sense of meaning. This paper argues that color idioms pose a Herculean translation task when rendering them from English into Arabic. By examining data from literary and political domains and employing Nida’s (1964) formal/functional equivalence, Baker’s (1992) idiom translation model, and Farghal and Shunnaq’s (1999) ideational equivalence, our analysis identifies two primary, exceedingly intractable, translation difficulties: the intricate idiomatic-symbolic meanings of color idioms, and the stark cultural disparities between these two languages. The findings also indicate that Baker’s (1992) borrowing the source language idiom, which prompted an insidiously exoticizingliteralist-formal translation,has turned out to be the most heavily used method,followed by translation-by-paraphrasing, which stimulated the weaving of noxious ‘colorless’ equivalents, whose ‘selvedges’ are arguably so frayed to ensure ‘colorful’ frayages, or full restitution of meaning. These ‘misfiring’ loss-ridden equivalents have been addressed by proposing, where necessary, more valorizing redressive translation solutions.