الفهرس 
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Abstract
Intertextuality is a semiotic-dialogic concept connoting the various connections which bond a text to another/others or the perception that all texts contain echoes and reverberations of past or contemporaneous texts. As a literary device taking forms like allusions, quotations, parodies, etc., intertextuality is a significant stage in deciphering any piece of literature, as it is essential to comprehend how other works have affected the writer and how different texts are implemented in the piece to convey certain meanings. The potential for failure to identify intertexts between languages and across cultures is likely to be greater than within them, and thus they may throw up challenges to translators. So, this study investigates the challenges in translating intertextual references of cultural, religious, and historical dimensions in literary contexts and at the same time highlights the adequate strategies followed by translators to successfully maintain the intertextual properties of STs. To this end, the Arabic ST of Mahfouz’s Trilogy and its English translation are used. Then, a contrastive analysis of ST-TT coupled pairs is carried out to figure out how Arabic intertextual signs are transferred into English. For data analysis, a synthetic model is formulated based on an integration of some influential taxonomies of translation strategies dealing with culturemes. The findings show that, to minimize the loss of the intertextual context of the ST, translators resort to strategies that, in addition to achieving a certain level of semantic equivalence based on linguistic acceptability in the TL, ensure that such context is captured and relayed into the TL.
Key words: intertextuality, cultural turn, semiotics, literary translation, Arabic literature, Mahfouz’s Trilogy.
Summary
Intertextuality signifies the textual space where texts cite, rewrite, assimilate, overlap, or rather clone each other in a variety of ways, forming new (hyper)texts. Historically, intertextuality as a term was coined by the poststructuralist critic Kristeva in the 1960s and has been influential in the field of literary and cultural studies ever since. Kristeva’s concept might be taken as an attempt on her part to synthesize her readings of Saussure’s semiotics (1916) with Bakhtin’s dialogism (1929). The combination of the Saussurean and Bakhtinian notions has helped Kristeva to formulate her idea that all texts, literary or not, establish a network of relationships either explicitly or implicitly. Being cultural information-bearing units, intertexts are not employed randomly in a piece of literature but are almost motivated; they are encapsulated by text producers to provide the necessary background to assist readers in understanding better different components and dimensions of language, culture, history, and religion, among other things. If such recognition can possibly be missed intralingually, the possibility is doubled when the reading is interlingual, as in translation activities. Therefore, this study explores the way this important aspect of textuality is dealt with in translating literary works in general and Mahfouz’s Trilogy in particular. In other words, this study attempts to answer the questions: If the primary focus of intertextuality is to generate a set of meanings, how can the translators recognize the inwardness of intertextual potentials in Mahfouz’s Trilogy, and what traces and forms of intertextuality can be found in this work? To what extent is intertextuality significant to the process of translating Mahfouz’s Trilogy into English? How can the translators mitigate falling in the trap of misunderstanding to the different shades of meanings generated by intertextualized associations when traveling from one text to another? While having in mind the concepts ‘intertextual space’ and ‘allusions as culture bumps’, what are the strategies adopted by the translators to reproduce the same aesthetic and rhetorical values that exist in the ST in the TT?
In conclusion, this study is divided into an introduction and five chapters. The introductory section explains the context, objectives, hypotheses, significance, limitations, and organization of the study and research problem and questions as well. Chapter one is a review of the literature about the prime issues of the study such as language, cultural turn, semiotics, and intertextuality in translation in general and the translation of literary works in particular. Besides, it explores the manifestations of intertextual associations between and within literary works to see how intertextuality awareness affects the reading, reception, and translation of such works. This is, then, followed by a discussion of the challenges inherent in transferring intertextuality, being an intractable translation issue. Moreover, some previous studies on the translation of intertextuality from Arabic into English and vice versa are reviewed at the end of this chapter. Chapter two is chiefly devoted to the theory of intertextuality, its classifications, and the effective role played by allusions, quotations, and parody as intertextual markers indicating the ‘other text’. Then, Hatim and Mason’s semiotic approach to the translation of intertextuality is discussed, followed by a more detailed analysis of some taxonomies of translation strategies dealing with intertextual and cultural items, including Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet (1958), Peter Newmark (1988), and Lawrence Venuti (1995). Chapter three includes the procedures of collecting the data of this study and the model and tools suggested for analyzing the differences between Mahfouz’s Trilogy and its English translation. Chapter four encompasses the analysis and discussion of intertextual references of cultural, religious, and historical dimensions in translating the Trilogy into English. The last chapter sheds light on the concluding remarks of this study and suggestions for future research. Finally, there is a list of references utilized in this study.