Mediating Palestinian cultural difference between visibility and readability in translation of Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses

Abstract

This study examines how Nancy Roberts’s English translation of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses negotiates textual readability and the visibility of Palestinian cultural difference. Drawing on Venuti’s domestication–foreignization framework, it introduces the complementary concepts of token visibility and relational visibility. Token visibility refers to the retention of culturally marked lexical forms, whereas relational visibility concerns the recoverability of the social, historical, symbolic, ritual, and institutional relations embedded in those forms. Using a qualitative comparative design, the study analyses 15 purposively selected Arabic–English textual pairs from Nasrallah’s Arabic novel and Roberts’s translation. The examples cover devotional and religious language, material culture and everyday practice, communal, legal, and administrative institutions, and political-historical terminology. The findings show that Roberts neither consistently domesticates nor uniformly foreignizes Palestinian cultural difference. Borrowing and transliteration preserve token visibility in terms such as Fatiha, dalla, and qa’imaqam, but lexical retention does not necessarily make their cultural functions accessible to English-language readers. Conversely, functional equivalents such as “village midwife” and “bread oven” replace Arabic signifiers while preserving immediate referential meaning and narrative function. The most consequential shifts occur in the translation of customary, legal, and administrative institutions. Renderings such as “guesthouse,” “the deed,” and “peacemaking delegation” facilitate comprehension but reduce the visibility of authority structures, historical procedures, and collective practices encoded by maḍāfa, kūshān, and jāha. By contrast, “district head, or qa’imaqam” shows how concise intra-textual glossing can combine readability with lexical and relational visibility. The study argues that domestication is most consequential when familiar English categories narrow source-specific relational systems, while foreignization remains limited when retained terms are socially or historically opaque.