The negotiation of culture-specific concepts in the English translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace of Desire

Literary translation plays a central role in mediating culture across linguistic boundaries, particularly when the source text is deeply embedded in a specific socio-cultural context. Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace of Desire, the second volume of The Cairo Trilogy, is a culturally dense realist novel that poses significant challenges for translators working into English. This article examines how culture-bound lexical items, religious references, and culturally specific expressions are negotiated in the English translation by William Maynard Hutchins, Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny, and Angele Botros Samman. Adopting a qualitative, text-oriented analytical approach, the study compares selected source-text expressions with their English renderings to identify recurring translation strategies and their cultural implications. Thus, the study employs a qualitative comparative analysis of selected source-text and target-text segments to examine patterns of cultural mediation. The analysis shows that while the translators often prioritize readability and accessibility for Anglophone readers, such strategies at times lead to a partial reconfiguration of cultural meanings and social distinctions embedded in the Arabic text. The article argues that these shifts should be understood not simply as translation ‘errors’ but as outcomes of broader norms governing the circulation of Arabic literary works in English translation.