Discussing the implementation of Farghal’s (1994) theory of equivalence in the translation of Katherine Pangonis’s Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule

Abstract

Equivalence is a core concept in translation studies, both theoretically and practically, and has been heavily debated since the 1960’s. It is an essential part of every translator’s experience regardless of the language they’re dealing with. The aim of this paper is to review the various theories on the concept of equivalence according to Jakobson (1959), Catford (1965), Nida and Taber (1969), Koller (1979), Newmark (1981), Farghal (1994) Vinay and Darbelnet (1995) and Pym (2010) to shed light on its evolution over time and to discuss the application of Farghal’s (1994) concept of equivalence in the translation of an excerpt from Katherine Pangonis’s historical non-fiction novel Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule. The quality of the translation will be analyzed using qualitative methods with the objective of proving that applying Farghal’s theory of equivalence is an effective approach specifically when translating an English text to Arabic.