Saad Elkhadem's The Plague in English: A Study of the Translation Strategies used to Recreate the Egyptian Ethos

This thesis focuses on translation as a transcultural activity. It studies the foreignizing and domesticating translation strategies used to recreate the Egyptian ethos in the translation of Elkhadems The Plague from Arabic to English. Five theories are incorporated in the analysis. These are Venutis Domesticating and Foreignizing Theory; Tourys DTS; Genettes Paratexts; Pedersens taxonomy of strategies for rendering culture-bound references and his classification of culture-bound elements; and Vermeers Skopos Theory. Three types of analysis are conducted: a literary analysis of the source text; a microanalysis of the target text, further divided into an analysis of the novel's paratexts and a descriptive analysis of ninety-eight culture-bound references; and finally, a macro-analysis of the overall norms and of the skopos of the translation showing how both affect the transmission of the Egyptian ethos. Overall, this thesis provides some insight into the influence of translation on cultural identity.