Translation of Culture-Specific Expressions in Arabic Novels: A Case Study of Who Killed the Flamingo?

This study deals with the translation of culture-specific expressions and words in Arabic novels. The object of this study is the Arabic novel entitled Who Killed the Flamingo? which is about the conflicts and struggles that the Iraqi people faced during the allied occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2014. This study firstly aims to introduce the target reader to the Iraqi culture. Secondly, it shows the extent to which Nida’s strategy of domestication can be applied to the Iraqi culture-specific words and expressions. Thirdly, it specifies the extent to which Venuti’s foreignization strategy can be applied to the names of people, places and the other culture-specific items in the novel. In this study, two main strategies are adopted, namely foreignization and domestication. This study found that in translating a literary work, literary translators should adopt and combine these two vital strategies, with a view to bridging the gap between any two different cultures, and at the same time produce literary texts that read natural in the target culture. It emerges from this study that further research needs to be conducted on the translation of this text by retranslating it into Arabic to determine whether or not it gives the same meaning as the source Arabic text before translation.