Proposed Taxonomy of Strategies for Translating English Proverbs into Arabic

Abstract

The present study aimed to provide a proposed taxonomy of strategies for translating English proverbs into Arabic. The proposed taxonomy classified the strategies for the Arabic translation of English proverbs into five, depending on the form and meaning of proverbs and the availability of equivalent proverbs in Arabic. The strategies are an exact match between English and Arabic proverbs, a match except for key culture-specific and environment-specific words, a complete mismatch in form with intact meaning, equivalent lines of Arabic poetry to some English proverbs and literal translation with or without an explanation. The taxonomy was applied to a sample of English proverbs with their Arabic equivalents per the classification of translation strategies suggested in this study.