An-Najah Staff

Translating proverbs across languages and cultures has been troublesome for most translators as proverbs are deeply rooted in culture and “deal directly with societal customs that might not translate directly to certain other societies.”¹ They reflect the cultural heritage of their people and “contain a vast treasure of information and knowledge on the sociocultural life of their beholders.”² Translators’ attempts to find proper equivalence in the target language (TL) to bridge this gap are fraught with difficulties. Most of their endeavors have been devoted to comparing lists of proverbs in both the source language (SL) and the TL and to making matches between source and target proverbs. Thus, we might be led to think that proverbial meaning is frozen and has acquired a “slogan-like status.”³ Accordingly, proverb translation is judged by the proverb’s circulation among and familiarity to the TL audience. An equivalent proverb in the TL earns currency as long as it is most circulated; however, little attention has been paid to the proverb’s context and linguistic structure, the things that may prompt translators to abandon a familiar, most circulated TL proverb for one that well accommodates its exact contextual meaning. The fact of the matter is that proverbs very often occur in peculiar contexts, but translators usually consult ready-made lists of decontextualized proverbs to find proper equivalents.