Transculturation in literary translation: an SFL genre-based analysis of religious identity in Midaq Alley from Arabic into English

This study investigates how religious identity is realized through transculturation in the English translation of Midaq Alley using an integrated framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, genre theory, and Spradley's ethnographic analysis. Drawing on selected expressions from the Arabic source text and their English renderings, the study shows that translation reconfigures religious meanings through functional equivalence, adaptation, and re-semiotization rather than literal transfer alone. Findings reveal that religious expressions construct interpersonal relations, divine worldview, moral regulation, and spiritual aspiration across narrative stages, while translation largely preserves these meanings through genre-mediated cultural negotiation. The study argues that literary translation functions as cultural recreation and contributes a genre-based transculturation model for analyzing religious identity in cross-cultural literary translation.