الفهرس 
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Abstract
The present research examines the manner in which cognitive linguistics may be utilized to account for (un)translatability, namely that of cultural elements in literary texts. It is concerned with how a translator would, knowingly or otherwise, employ cognitive processes related to frame reference in the process of translation. The study should, therefore, help in defining the choices made by the translators in translating such items as products of cognitive processes rather than idiosyncratic decisions. The hypothesis is based on the researcher’s assumption that a translated text should evoke a similar semantic frame in the mind of the TL reader to the one that the original evokes in the mind of the SL reader, even if the SL frame in non-existent in the TL, in which case reading the TL text either becomes a learning experience involving adding new frames to the TL reader’s linguistic and encyclopedic repertoires or otherwise a frame that already exists in the SL is used.
The corpus consists of examples taken within their contexts from three modern Egyptian novels: Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery, Zaat, and Taxi.
The frame model employed in this study is based on the one presented by Rojo (2002a), although it does attempt to reclassify and reorganize the original model in response to the larger data set. It covers four of the original five categories suggested by Rojo: SOCIAL frames, PERCEPTUAL frames (originally VISUAL frames in Rojo 2002a), GENERIC frames, and TEXTUAL
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frames (originally TEXT TYPE frames). Situational frames are not part of this study due to the lack of data representing them in the data set. In this sense, the study aims to answer three main research questions: (a) How can the link between cognitive linguistics and translation provide a tool for the analysis of translatability? (b) What are the cognitive properties associated with the translation of culturally-motivated terms from Arabic into English? (c) How do semantic frame overlaps account for the existence of multiple levels of translatability?
The study reached the conclusion that the different degrees of untranslatability may be accounted for by the fact that frames overlap to the point where it is expected for any given term to be represented by multiple frame references, in which case the term becomes more translatable, in theory, the more of its frames are individually translatable. This relative translatability is reliant upon the importance of the untranslatable frames, where one must account for the differences between frames indicating literal and figurative meaning, as well as cultural discrepancies between SL and TL.
Key terms:
Frame semantics, translatability, cultural terms, language and culture, cognitive linguistics, cognition and translation.