Procedures and Strategies in the Translation into Malay of Cultural Elements of Rihlat Ibn Battuta

Abstract

This research investigates procedures and strategies involved in the process of translating cultural elements of Arabic into Malay. It sets out to contribute to the development of the understanding of the translation of the Arabic-Malay language pair, especially in translating cultural differences. This study starts by locating itself within both the Holmes framework for translation studies and Toury’s methodology of descriptive translation studies (DTS). The source-text/target-text pair that is the subject of the analysis is a very prominent book from fourteenth-century Arabic travel literature, Rihlat Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta, and its published Malay translation Pengembaraan Ibn Battutah (2003). As well as a detailed linguistic analysis of these long texts, this study also locates the texts in their socio-cultural and historical context. This includes the background of translation into Malay and the explicit comments the translators make about their working practice.

Based on the theory of culture of Hall/Katan (1959/1990), three prominent elements of culture are selected for analysis: religious items (part of formal culture), food/drink and clothing (part of technical culture). A manual analysis of ST and TT coupled pairs is employed based on a methodological modification of the taxonomy of Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/95). This analysis leads to the identification of the procedures used by the translators. From these procedures, the overall strategies of translation are determined. This process therefore helps to uncover the norms of the translation of these selected cultural elements.

Analysis of the data is provided in chapters six to nine. The most frequent procedures are borrowing, explicitation, literal translation and generalization. The findings indicate different trends in implementing borrowing, a key feature of the Malay language. For religious items, standard borrowing is the most dominant procedure whereas for items of food and drink, and clothing, new borrowings are most commonly-found. The findings also indicate a variation between foreignization and domestication. Based on these findings, guidelines for the translation of Arabic cultural elements into Malay are developed.