Translatability of Religious Intertextuality in Literary Texts

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating the difficulties faced in translating religious intertexts in the novel of Midaq Alley by the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz [1], seeking to explore the challenges and difficulties that affected both the translator and the target-text readership of this novel. Such difficulties result from the different attitudes of both Arabic and English cultures towards religious practices. It shows how such differences affected the target text and how the translator copes with them during the translation process. It hopes that is research highlights how cultural losses continue to occur even when the target text does not suffer any linguistic loss. Such losses are on the symbolic and deep level where the translator should read between the lines to capture the cultural implications meant by the source-text producer