Text Analysis of Wadida Wassef's "Hard Up"

Wadida Wassef's translation of Yusuf Idris's short story "شغالنة" comes across as largely communicative and reads fluently thanks to the idiomatic English used. The idiomatic pattern of Wassef's translation is spotted straight from the title and the first few lines that follow. She opts for translating the slang Egyptian expression " قرشين إلى حاجة "فى(which figuratively refers to an amount of money hardly enough for someone to get by) to 'hard up', the equivalent slang expression in English. This choice is equally successful in the title's translation: the word "شغالنة", if translated literally into 'A Job' or even with a little twist as in 'Just a Job', will not convey the theme of the story. "شغالنة" is Egyptian slang for a temporary, low-paid, blue-collar job, which would have been long for a title. Moreover, the story has more to it than Abdou's unemployment; it is about him and million others like him being eternally 'hard up' even when employed, it is about the fate an entire social class is condemned to. The idiomatic pattern continues to reign over the translation: " واحدة وتيرة على يبقى لم الحال لكن is translated to the "وequivalent stock phrase "nothing lasts forever"; " فى أمل هناك يكن لم" ;is rendered as "no end in sight", a popular idiom "نهايته عزه is "أيامsubstituted with its equivalent "in his prime"; and the cultural bump created by " له فتحت قد القدر ليلة is dissolved with the idiom "in a "كأنtransport of joy". Sometimes the translation even uses idioms where none is used in the ST, as in "تسليها" being translated to "keep her company" and " الفجر ."to "at the crack of dawn "فى

Keeping up with the communicative approach, Wassef makes a number of wise stylistic choices observing the syntactic difference between Arabic and English. While Arabic traditionally opts for more words, hence longer sentences, English is known for concision. Therefore, " بلباقة ... is condensed into "wangle" (which means "يقبضearning money with skill and persuasion). Similarly, the nostalgic lamentation conveyed by " ضاع ... الذى إلى is expressed by a "يتشوقsingle English word, "bemoan".

Nonetheless, a couple of awkward choices occasionally hindered the stylistic flow. A chunky clause such as "no sooner had they exchanged the perfunctory words of greeting" certainly has something forbidding about it with both 'perfunctory' and 'greeting' appearing in one sequence. This comes where a simple "no sooner had Tolba asked if everything was fine" (my translation) could have served as a translation of " طلبه كاد ما و

الحال عن The term "Carbolic acid" appearing a literary text about ."يسأله

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a potentially uneducated protagonist also strikes the reader as awkward. The term is used as a translation for "فنيك", the commercial name for "carbolic acid" that the Egyptian layman cannot fail to recognize. Moreover, "carbolic acid" is rarely, if at all, used in western households for cleaning. A more appropriate translation would be "the place smelt of strong bathroom cleaners", thus preserving the commercial nature of " ."فنيك

In translating Idris's imagery, Wassef employs a wide range of strategies. One strategy is equivalence: she renders " السماسرة "كهنوتinto "inner circles", an equivalent English stock metaphor expressing the same leverage, power and secrecy implied by the Arabic metaphor. Partial paraphrase and shift of emphasis are used in translating the complex image in " فى يوم تنقصكل و بالميزان العيش لهم تبيع الدنيا و to "life went on providing their daily bread, growing daily more "الميزانniggardly". While Wassef successfully preserves the personification (in that life is a miser woman who provides them with an ever-decreasing share of bread), the figurative process in the image is paraphrased. Western readers, who are only familiar with digital scales, may fail to understand the significance of the reference to the old manual scales. Therefore, the emphasis has to be shifted from the unjust scales to the injustice of life itself. Pure paraphrase is another viable strategy that Wassef uses when translating " جلبابه تعبر هى و تقشعر بالنظرات أحس to "he noticed the revulsion his worn and threadbare gallabieh "المهلهلaroused". Perhaps her choice in this specific instance is purely stylistic, opting for less dramatic language so as not to put off the modern English reader. In doing so, however, she betrays Idris's social realism. The "gaze", made all the more concrete in the ST yet omitted in the TT, is crucial to explaining the dehumanization of Abdou and his likes. (A suggested translation: "he could feel the disgusted gazes penetrating his thin body through the holes of his tattered gallabieh".)

Part of Wassef's communicative success in "Hard Up" is her generally correct use of collocation. Examples include modulating the passive voice in " بالفتق to the active voice in "developed a "أصيبhernia", mainly to fulfill the collocational rules of English. Correspondingly, " الفارع ,"is rendered as "his enormous frame "عودهbecause 'tall' is not as frequently used a collocate of 'frame' as 'enormous'. Moreover, " ... Kجميال is translated to the collocating English pair "a "صوتهpleasant voice". There is, however, a mistake with collocation in "worked his way up to the inner circles": logically speaking, one cannot make his way up a circle, but rather into it. But, since collocations are arbitrary, a frequency test is the only method for judgment. A test would demonstrate

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that the word 'ladder' is the popular collocate of 'work one's way up', as in "work his way up the corporate ladder". With "inner circles", however, native speakers would almost exclusively opt for 'work one's way into'. Collocational meaning also seems to be overlooked in the case of translating "تتوحم" as "yearning for": a pregnant woman craves, not yearns for, food.

On the semantic level, Wassef successfully contends with some of the problems of denotative meaning. The hypernym "dress", for instance, replaces the culturally specific "gallabieh" that certainly does not have a lexical equivalent in English. Denotatively, the words "عم" and "خال" correspond to the English word "uncle" which serves as a hypernym of maternal and paternal uncles, therefore the translation of " خاله و to "عمه"his uncles, paternal and maternal". Semantic repetition, a feature of the Arabic language, is overcome by several strategies. For example, "

العابس is reduced to "a frown" with a simple act of omission "المقطبand transposition. Wassef wards off another repetition in " و نفيسة لغط is standard "لغط" the two words are near-synonyms, except ;"دوشتهاArabic whereas "دوشتها" is Egyptian slang. The combination is rendered faithfully as "incessant chatter", with the standard "incessant" onomatopoeically replacing the noise of both "دوشتها" and "لغط" and coming longside the slang "chatter" to fill the semantic gap. Translating "

as "decent people", however, comes across as an "أناسطيبين unfortunate choice on both the denotative and connotative levels. While the word "decent" denotes kindness, it has additional denotations relating to propriety of behavior and morality. The connotations of this additional meaning do not correspond to the vulgar nature of these simple Egyptians who get into daily "brawls". A word like "warmhearted" or "kindhearted" will not contradict the denotations or the connotations of "طيبين" in this specific context.

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