Translating English Cultural Terms into Arabic: A Gift from Saint Nicolas as a Case Study

Abstract

                This paper discusses the translator's approach in translating a story from the domain of children literature. It analyzes several Arabic translations of an English novel titled: A Gift from Saint Nicholas by Carole Kismaric as a case study. The intention is to study how to translate ST cultural items in children literature into Arabic by distributing a Christian story to be translated. MA translation students did the translations at An-Najah National University. Then, the researchers indicated the terminologies and categorized them both in the ST and the TT. The TT equivalence was studied and analyzed according to lexical items and the translation strategies used. The researchers adopted the qualitative approach in the study by examining the translated versions. The paper concludes that the translators used either dynamic equivalence for early readers or formal equivalence with footnotes for adult readers as a main strategy among others.