Translating Marriage: A Study on Intercultural Manipulation

Authors

  • Dania Adel Salamah

    College of Language Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11451, Saudi Arabia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i11.11754
Received: 22 August 2025 | Revised: 29 August 2025 | Accepted: 3 September 2025 | Published Online: 23 October 2025

Abstract

The current study set out to examine the strategies used to translate marriage-related culture-specific legal terms in the Family Law of Saudi Arabia, with the aim of determining the degree of intercultural manipulation involved in translating these terms from Arabic into English. The study adopted a qualitative descriptive research design where 35 marriage-related culture-specific legal terms were extracted from a corpus composed of the Family Law and its official English translation, and then analyzed qualitatively using Aixelá’s typology (1996) of conservative and substitution translation strategies. The results revealed that both conservative and substitution strategies were used to translate marriage-related culture-specific legal terms with a tendency towards using conservative strategies (59%). The findings also indicated that linguistic translation was the most frequently used conservative strategy and that naturalization was the most frequently used substitution strategy. Furthermore, the findings showed that, although there was a tendency against intercultural manipulation, such a tendency was moderate, as intercultural manipulation affected the translation of 41% of the terms. This may be due to the polarity found in marriage-related concepts with some being universal while others remain culturally unique. The researcher concludes that multiple factors contribute to the choice of translation strategy, such as the centrality of the term to the source text, the availability of an equivalent term in the target language, and the provision of a definition or explanation for the term in the source text.

Keywords:

Culture-Specific Terms; Intercultural Manipulation; Legal Translation; Translating Culture; Translation Strategies and Procedures

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How to Cite

Salamah, D. A. (2025). Translating Marriage: A Study on Intercultural Manipulation. Forum for Linguistic Studies, 7(11), 912–925. https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i11.11754

Issue

Vol. 7 , Iss. 11 (November 2025): In progress

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Article

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Copyright © 2025 Dania Adel Salamah

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This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.