Défis de la traduction vers le français d’énoncés sentencieux en arabe littéraire, saoudien et égyptien

Abstract

This article deals with the translation of sententious sayings in literary Arabic and in the Saudi and Egyptian dialects. This specific kind of translation presents linguistic and cultural difficulties. Especially in conserving and transmitting their social and pragmatic values of the original language to the translated one. To answer this question, we observed some of sententious sayings (in literary Arabic and in Saudi and Egyptian) and their translations, from Arabic to French and vice versa. We began with a linguistic analysis of the utterances and tried to identify the similarities and differences in the argumentative aims of the original language and those of the target language. Then, we followed the approach adopted by Jean-Claude Anscombre by studying some translations of sententious sayings according to precise criteria and testing their validity for the French-Arabic translations and vice versa. The results showed that the concept of equivalence is approximate, fuzzy for “practical” reasons (including the question of reception with the target reader, depending on the doxa, in order to minimize differences in cultural references). The translator attached importance to the content of the sententious sayings without too much attention to the literal meaning, the syntax or the morphology of the source text.