Intercultural Literary Translation: Translating مدينة الموتى (The City of the Dead) into English

This MA thesis presents my translation from Arabic to English of the introduction and two chapters from the novel مدينة الموتى (The City of the Dead) by the Egyptian author Hassan Elgendy. This thesis also includes a commentary and analysis of the issues of cultural equivalence that arose during the translation process. The novel is a horror fiction set within Arab and Islamic culture, which means that it has various culture-specific elements which are not easily transferred into English. These elements are subdivided into two categories: (a) cultural and religious elements and (b) metaphysical elements. The commentary also shows how I adopt Venuti’s (2008) principles of domestication and foreignization in order to reach my purpose of producing a literary translation which, from one side, remains respectful of the source culture discourse, and from the other side, can still be considered as commercially valuable. In order to guide me in my translation choices, I also rely on an anthropological approach referred to as universal cognition, which reflects anthropologists’ efforts to explain cultural similarities between different communities by associating them to the cognitive similarities believed to be universally shared by all humans. By referring to this approach, I do not adopt the traditional focus on the differences between the source and target cultures, but rather look for similarities and common grounds between them, in an attempt to contribute to addressing more effectively issues of cultural equivalence.