Moroccan Arabic Proverbs and their English Dynamic Equivalents: do English and Moroccan Cultures have anything in Common?
Abstract
The main aim of this article is to show that proverbial utterances can be used as linguistic evidence to prove that world cultures, even those that seem to be completely different, do share values, norms, ideas, etc., which can be said to be part of universal human experiences. For this particular purpose, we select a number of Moroccan Arabic Proverbs (MAP’s) to investigate their translatability into English via Dynamic Equivalence Approach (D.E.A). This approach can accurately translate from a source language (SL) to a target language (TL) any proverb carrying a given cultural feature that is shared by the cultures in which the involved languages are embedded. The successful applicability of D.E.A to the translation of MAP’s constituting our data is used in this article to argue that although Moroccan and English cultures do not hold the same perceptions towards a variety of human experiences, they still have similar cultural views about different aspects of life.
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