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Abstract:
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This paper aims at examining the pragmatic and linguistic problems that permeate the English translation of Naguib Mahfouz's The Thief and the Dogs. The paper presents evidence that the translators failed to appreciate the importance of context in determining the meaning of the source language text. The paper also shows that the translators sometimes ignored such pragmatic concepts and priniciples as speech acts, the maxims of the Politeness Principle, conventional implicature and presupposition. Moreover, some problems rise at the word level and phrase/clause levels. The conclusion drawn in this paper is that the negligence of translators in dealing with such problems can contribute to the distortion of meaning, which detracts from the effectiveness and merit of the original novel.
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