A Moment of Truth in Translating Proper Names in Naguib Mahfouz’ Trilogy from Arabic into English
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study tackles the translation of proper names in Naguib Mahfouz’s Trilogy from Arabic into English. A masterpiece of three volumes, namely, Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street, was translated by Hutchins and Kenny (1990), Hutchins, Kenny and Kenny (1991), and Hutchins and Saman (1992), respectively. In the English translation of this trilogy, proper names were preserved in a process of transliterating, thus maintaining a foreignized sense of rendition. Such mere strategy constitutes an alternative among a spectrum of many others suggested in the domain of translating proper names, viz., creation, adaptation, addition, omission, among others. Nevertheless, the researcher used four proper names as case studies representative of the inadequacy of merely transliterating proper names in Mahfouz’s literary work. Mahfouz imbued his work with an enchanting style that became an emblem of his folkloric locality. Yet this folkloric touch was not faithfully depicted in the English translation mainly due to the linguistic and cultural gaps between the source language and the target one. The analysis of the four names that the researcher purposefully chose represents such loss. A charge of functional equivalence and intended irony was traced thereby. Correspondingly, a backup strategy to compensate this inequivalence between the original work and its English rendition proves to be missing in doing justice to such work. Key words: Naguib Mahfouz; Literary translation; Foreignization; Domestication; Transliteration
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".