A Comparative Study Of The Use Of Dialogue In Naguib Mahfouz’s The Thief And The Dogs And Its Translation:

Mohammad Abdel Mohsen Youssef

The main focus of this thesis is to make a comparative study between thedialogue in Naguib Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs and its Englishtranslation. The Thief and the Dogs (1961) was translated by Trevor LeGassick and M.M. Badawi and revised by John Rodenbeck in 1984. The aim of the thesis is to elucidate through a comparative analysis, therelation between the Arabic dialogic extracts and their English counterpartsin light of the differences between the two languages. It tries to show howthe translators of The Thief and the Dogs deal with its stylistic features and to manifest to what extent they keep or violate these features. The first chapter paves the way to the rest of the study as it firstly demonstrates how Arabic, as any other language, can be possibly translated with the averageloss found in any other translated works. It consists of three parts: translationtheories, involvement strategies (ellipsis, repetition, parallelism, imagery,and etc.), and an illustrative analysis focusing on violating involvementstrategies in the translation.The second chapter firstly tries to present how Mahfouz proficientlyintermingles voices in the novel particularly through the outstanding use of the stream of consciousness of Said Mahran showing the impact of thisplurality of voices on the source reader. Secondly, it reveals how thetranslators sometimes fail to realize the importance of this technique in thesource text and how this undoubtedly reduces the involving effect on thetarget reader. In the third chapter, the thesis focuses on how Mahfouz deliberately inserts his Egyptian clues within Modern Standard Arabic dialogues to enable his reader to be fully aware of the social background of hischaracters. Having some clues, the source readers do not face any problemin identifying the social rank of the illiterate characters such as Said Mahran, Bayaza, Tarzan, Nur, and Ilish. This final chapter, likewise, concludes that through overlooking such helpful clues, the translation may sometimes beperplexing for the target reader particularly when there are no cluesemployed to distinguish such illiterate characters.