An Analysis of Translation of Arabic Lexical Collocations into English With Special Focus on Season of Migration to the North

Abstract

The present study focuses on an analysis of the strategies adopted in translating the lexical collocations in two chapters of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. The main objective of this study is to illuminate strategies used by the translator while transferring lexical collocations into the target language. For purpose of this study, only two types of lexical collocations: verb + noun collocations and adjective + noun collocations have been selected. The examined data consist of relatively short sentences including contextualized lexical collocations. A descriptive quantitative method has been used in this study. The findings have shown that the translator has resorted to various strategies in order to overcome the problems of rendering these lexical collocations. The employed strategies were idiomatic translation, literal translation, calque, modulation, equivalence, transposition and paraphrasing. Moreover, the study indicates that in some cases, non- collocations end up as colocations in the target text. It is recommended that literal translations should be avoided and strategies which help convey the implied message and producing dynamic equivalence should be used.