Arabic Metonymy and Synecdoche in English Translation: The Case of Body Parts

Abstract

This paper examines the figurative use, both metonymy and synecdoche, of Arabic body parts in English literary translation. The aim is twofold: first to investigate the translational procedures used to render them and, second, to see what linguistic and cultural constraints determine translational choices. The corpus consists of first-encountered 100 Arabic utterances featuring names of body parts extracted from Naguib Mahfouz’s (1947) novel زقاق المدق and their English renditions in LeGassick’s translation Zuqaq Almadaq (1992). The data is first categorized in terms of literal and figurative use, and then the latter is classified into metonymy and synecdoche. The results show that translational choices are governed by linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural constraints of both English and Arabic discourse. The study concludes that reference to body parts varies in terms of frequency in favor of Arabic but they are a common feature of both languages’ literary discourse. Therefore, the translator has to be sensitive to their literal as well as figurative meaning within each culture, in order to provide, when possible, a parallel physical description and preserve the aesthetic value of metonymic and synecdochic expressions. Keywords: Arabic, English, Body parts, Metonymy, Synecdoche, Translation.