Impact of mother culture on the process of translating culture-specific idioms

Abstract

This study endeavors to explore the problems that Translation trainees’ mother culture poses when translating culture-specific idioms. The study used a translation task that comprises 20 culture-specific English idioms which incorporate lexical entities that can have negative connotations in the Arabic culture. The task was distributed to 40 randomly selected translation trainees, senior undergraduate translation students at the Department of Arabic and Translation, College of Languages, Sana’a University. Findings of the study show that the trainees’ mother culture had a considerable impact on the translation process. This impact exhibited itself in many forms, the most prominent of which is the tendency to offer a culturally-driven judgment of the content of the idiom instead of translating the idiom itself. The paper delineates the various forms of cultural interference as seen in the trainees’ renditions of the idioms in the study.