Arabic Proverbs in Fiction Translation: Girls of Riyadh as an Example

This study aims to examine the semiotic/pragmatic value of employing proverbs in Arabic fiction and the way translators deal with such proverbs when encountering them in discourse. The study presents a typology of the translation procedures employed by the translators, and examines how appropriate/effective these procedures are in capturing the semiotic value of the proverb in question. The corpus consists of 24 proverbs/proverbial expressions extracted from the Arabic novel (banaat al-riyaadh) and then they are compared with their renderings in the English translated version (Girls of Riyadh). The data is analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively, focusing on a critical evaluation of the procedures detected in the English translation. The quantitative analysis indicates that omission is the most used procedure, followed by literal translation and functional translation. For its part, the qualitative analysis furnishes a critical discussion on the rendering of sample proverbs from each translation procedure and assesses the translators awareness and treatment of such proverbs.