Eco-Translatology in the English Translation of Two Contemporary Arabic Novels: Sunset Oasis and The Old Woman and the River

Abstract

This study applies Hu Gengshen’s eco-translatology to the English translations of two contemporary Arabic novels: Bahaa Taher’s Wāḥat al-ghurūb (Sunset Oasis, translated by Humphrey Davies, 2009) and Ismail Fahd Ismail’s Al-Sabiliyat (The Old Woman and the River, translated by Sophia Vasalou, 2019). Eco-translatology views translation as the translator’s adaptive selection within a translational eco-environment and evaluates it by its degree of holistic adaptation and selection across linguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions. Although scholars have widely applied the paradigm to Chinese–English translation, they have rarely tested it on English translations of Arabic fiction. Using a qualitative, descriptive-comparative design, the study analyses 31 aligned source–target items together with each translation’s paratext. The most demanding challenges arise from diglossia and dialect, culture-bound social and religious vocabulary, and passages whose meaning depends on implicature or comment on language. Davies leans on the source ecology, retaining Siwan terms and compensating for diglossia through register, but his historical glossary leaves key local terms unexplained. Vasalou leans on the target ecology, producing fluent English and preserving the novel’s ecological lexicon, while generalising some cultural items and softening the agency behind the novel’s man-made drought. Neither translation achieves full eco-balance. The study extends eco-translatology to Arabic–English literary translation and proposes a sociolinguistic sub-dimension and closer attention to the ecological content of source texts.