Social Criticism of Literary translation through Crowdsourcing: An Audience Reception Study on Biblical Metaphors in Isaiah and Paradise Lost Translated from English into Standard and Tunisian Arabic

My research draws upon translation studies, sociolinguistics,

cross-cultural studies, reception theory and cognitive linguistics.

It attempts to analyse cultural otherness in biblical metaphors use in

literary translation, namely cognitive and socio-cultural differences relative to

metaphors used in everyday language to conceptualize ‘God’, ‘sin’ and ‘salvation’,

and the impact of otherness on the translator’s decision-making and the reception

of a translated product by a certain target readership.

The metaphorical comparison will be conducted between English and Arabic.

The objective of my research is to analyse the socio-cultural universality

and variation in the metaphorical conceptualization of ‘God’, ‘sin’ and ‘salvation’

between English, standard Arabic and the Tunisian dialect in biblical literature,

namely in the epic poem of John Milton entitled Paradise Lost and in The Book of

Isaiah in the Old Testament of The Bible.

My study also focuses on the impact of conceptualization universality and

conceptualization variation on the comprehension, translation and reception of

these biblical metaphors translated into the Tunisian dialect by Tunisian Facebook

users.