Strategies and Challenges of Adapting The Yellow Wallpaper to Qatari Culture

This thesis explores domesticating and adapting the short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman to the Qatari culture. It aims to investigate the strategies needed to create a literary work targeted to the Qatari audience that would enrich the literary context in Qatar with a short story that tackles one of the least common themes in this genre in Qatar: mental illness. The adaptation aims to present a short story that emphasizes the aspects of the theme of mental illness found in the source text and project them on the Qatari culture and society to shed light on the attitudes and misconceptions about mental illness in Qatar. The process of adaptation relies on domesticating the cultural references identified in the source text using Newmark’s (1988) classification of cultural categories. The domestication depends mainly on substituting these cultural references with references to the Qatari culture following Aixela (1996) in a manner that serves the purpose of highlighting the theme of mental illness in the story. Accordingly, cultural references found in the setting of the story and those associated with the characters’ behavior have been domesticated to reflect certain attitudes and misconceptions about mental illness in Qatar. The thesis concludes that substituting cultural references is not enough to highlight these attitudes and misconceptions as the adaptation required recreating some aspects of the setting and the characters in order to relate them more closely to the Qatari culture.