Cultural Problems of Translating Mosuli Folk Songs into English
Najat Abdulrahman Hasan
University of Mosul-College of Arts - Dept. of Translation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/jls.3.3.6
Keywords: -folk songs -translation - mosuli - music -lyrics
Abstract
This paper aims at examining problems and difficulties encountered
by translators when attempting to translate Mosul's folk songs into
English. Folk songs originate among people of a certain country or
region. These songs are passed orally from one generation to the other.
Such lyrics are marked by having very specific linguistic and
phonological structures. The rationale behind this study is that the
translation of folk songs in general and Mosul's ones in particular has
not yet been given the proper attention and that there is a clear paucity
in the translation literature of such field. The problem that this study
will focus on, is that both novice translators and translation students
alike might find it difficult to translate the cultural meaning of folk
songs. The key aims of this study are to define the difficulties and
problems associated with the translation of folk songs, in addition to
analyzing the translation errors made by the students while conducting
the translation task. The study hypothesizes that there is no one- toone
translation equivalence between the SL and TL texts. It also
hypothesizes that translating folk songs requires special knowledge
and expertise that only competent translators might have. Conversely,
novice and incompetent translators will find it difficult to handle such
task properly. The model of Wilson (2009) will be adopted for this
study, since it provides an appropriate framework for the translation of
folk songs from Arabic into English.
As for the procedures followed, there will be a selection of certain
problematic folk songs excerpts for analysis. These excerpts will be
