Challenges in translating Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle

Abstract

This paper deals with some challenges encountered while translating Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle into Arabic. To highlight these difficulties, several examples were taken from the story and classified into: syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and cultural problems. All these examples were thoroughly analyzed and discussed. The study revealed that to overcome the problems encountered, a translator should scrutinize the context of situations and offer communicative translation to produce equivalent translation in terms of meaning and literary style.