Translating English Color Idioms into Arabic

Abstract

Color idioms, a special category of idioms, cannot be translationally approached without deep and ‘voracious’ cultural insight that goes beyond the transmittal of linguistic structure and a very parochial sense of meaning. This paper argues that color idioms pose a Herculean translation task when rendering them from English into Arabic. By examining data from literary and political domains and employing Nida’s (1964) formal/functional equivalence, Baker’s (1992) idiom translation model, and Farghal and Shunnaq’s (1999) ideational equivalence, our analysis identifies two primary, exceedingly intractable, translation difficulties: the intricate idiomatic-symbolic meanings of color idioms, and the stark cultural disparities between these two languages. The findings also indicate that Baker’s (1992) borrowing the source language idiom, which prompted an insidiously exoticizing literalist-formal translation, has turned out to be the most heavily used method, followed by translation-by-paraphrasing, which stimulated the weaving of noxious ‘colorless’ equivalents, whose ‘selvedges’ are arguably so frayed to ensure ‘colorful’  frayages, or full restitution of meaning. These ‘misfiring’ loss-ridden equivalents have been addressed by proposing, where necessary, more valorizing redressive translation solutions.

Highlights:

1. Color idioms are deeply culture-bound, carrying symbolic meanings that differ sharply between English and Arabic, which makes their translation especially challenging. 2. The analysis of 69 idioms shows two major translation obstacles: (a) the symbolic, non-literal meanings of color expressions, and (b) the wide cultural gap between the two languages. 3. Translators overwhelmingly relied on Baker’s (1992) “borrowing the source idiom”, producing literal/formal translations that often sounded foreign and failed to convey the idiomatic meaning. 4. Paraphrasing was the second most-used strategy, but it frequently resulted in “colorless” translations that erased the color symbolism and led to significant translation loss. 5. The study offers more functional or ideational alternatives in cases where the published translations misfired, showing how better cultural and semantic alignment can restore idiomatic meaning—even if color is sometimes lost.