Translating Cultural Concepts and Indeterminacy in Literary Texts: The Case of Lelie Marmon Silko

This study aims to assess how to translate the cultural content and the implicit logico-semantic relations between clauses and sentences from English into Arabic. Relying on the translation of eight sections from Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, the study will first look at how the cultural words in the source text (ST) were rendered into Arabic based on the theoretical framework proposed by Peter Newmark (1988), a framework that classifies cultural words into five categories and suggests seventeen strategies to render them. Second, the study will examine how the implicit logico-semantic relationships between clauses and sentences, which characterize English, can be accommodated for when translating an English text into Arabic, a language known for its strong emphasis on explicit conjunctiveness. Using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (2014), which elaborates the relationship between clauses and clause complexes, the study investigates how the translation coped with those instances where the relationship between two clauses inside the same clause complex or between two adjacent clause complexes posed a challenge to interpret and render into Arabic.