The translation of Arab apology strategies in Naguib Mahfouz’s “Palace Walk” into English: a pragmatic approach

Translation of apology speech acts poses significant challenges in cross-cultural communication due to their context-dependent and culturally embedded nature. Despite extensive research on apology strategies and translation, their intersection in Arabic–English literary translation remains underexplored. This study examines apology strategies in Mahfouz’s "Palace Walk" and their English translations, focusing on translation techniques, shifts, and translation quality. Adopting an integrated analytical framework combining pragmatic theories of apology and translation studies, the study employs a qualitative design. Data were purposively selected from apology speech acts in "Palace Walk" and analyzed using Spradley’s ethnographic analysis. Findings show that explanation or account of the situation is the most frequent apology strategy in the ST, while established equivalents are the predominant translation technique. The translation process involved pragmatic and cultural shifts, some of which affected the representation of culturally embedded meanings. Although the translations generally achieved high levels of accuracy, acceptability, and readability, certain pragmatic and cultural nuances were partially lost in the TT. The findings suggest that integrating cross-cultural pragmatics into translation training curricula would better equip translators to handle culturally embedded expressions and reduce pragmatic loss across languages.