EMPLOYING REISS?S FUNCTIONAL APPROACH: IN ANALYZING THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

The current qualitative descriptive-analytical study aimed at employing Katharina Reiss’s functional approach to examine the translations of the stylistic devices in Naguib Mahfouz’s novels, Khan al-Khalili, Midaq Alley, and Palace Walk, translated by Allen, Davies, and Hutchins and Kenny. To describe the strategies that each translator used, Newmark’s translation procedures were integrated into Reiss’s model. Data collection depended on a nonrandom sampling of English and Arabic texts containing such stylistic devices as alliteration, antithesis, metaphors, metonymy, parallelism, personification, and simile. The analysis of the data was conducted by comparing the source texts and target texts to examine the translation method adopted by each translator to achieve functional equivalence based on Reiss’s approach. The research findings indicated that the translation method affects the translation of stylistic devices and that each translator achieved a balance between the content and the form of the target texts while considering linguistic and extralinguistic factors that impact functional equivalence.