The Applicability of Baker's Taxonomy of Translation Strategies on Arabic Narrative Discourse

Cross cultural communication doesnt always bring its fruits effectively especially when dealing with literary Arabic discourse. The difficulties associated with finding the appropriate equivalence have been widely commented on by scholars and professional translators. Various translation strategies have been proposed by the translation researchers. This study aims to find out the applicability of Baker's taxonomy of the translation strategies used by translators in translating Arabic narrative discourse. Baker (1992) views equivalence as hierarchical, i.e., to cover the word level and above word level. The study deals with analyzing a set of extracts taken from three of Naguib Mahfouzs novels and their realizations in English.It is found that Baker's translation strategy taxonomy provides appropriate set of strategies to deal with non-equivalence problem.