International Journal of Arabic-English Studies (IJAES) Vol. 20, No.1, 2020 105 Translating Arabic Metaphorical Expressions into English: Mahfouz’s Morning and Evening Talkas an Example https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes2000.20.1.6 Mohammed Farghal and Raneen Mansour Kuwait University, Kuwait Abstract: The objective of this study is to examine Arabic metaphorical expressions in English translation with an eye to exploring the coding of such expressions, the procedures employed in rendering them, and the treatment of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic parameters in translation. The corpus consists of 100 Arabic metaphorical expressions extracted from Najeeb Mahfouz’s (1987) novel ḥadiiθ al-ṣbaaḥwa-l-masaa’ along with their English counterparts in Christina Philips’ translation Morning and Evening Talk (2007). The results show that the rendering of metaphorical expressions, which are mainly coded in terms of concrete-to-abstract borrowing (89%) rather than concrete-to-concrete borrowing (only 11%), involves several procedures: maintaining metaphor (57%), modifying metaphor (20%), demetaphoring metaphor (16%), and changing metaphor (7%). The results also indicate that while the syntagmatic parameter may be freely represented in terms of surface or underlying semantic roles which are sensitive to co-text in both source and target texts, the paradigmatic parameter is solely relevant to capturing the creative paradigm (whether in primary lexical correspondence, in synonymy or even co-hyponymy) regardless of the syntagmatic presentation. The study concludes that metaphors in literary discourse are part and parcel of the message and requires of the translator to take utmost care in preserving their aesthetic value by furnishing a comparably creative paradigm in the target text. Keywords: Arabic, English, metaphorical expressions, translation. 1. Introduction: Definition and typology of metaphor in English and Arabic Metaphors are figures of speech in which comparisons are brought up between two concepts in an unusual way to attract the reader’s attention and conceptualize ideas vividly. Following Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Schaffner (2004: 1257-1258) explains that "metaphors are not just decorative elements, but rather, basic resources for thought processes in human society". In Arabic, metaphor is called ̕̕ istiʻaarah (a list of phonetic symbols is provided in appendix), which literally means borrowing. Atiq (1985: 167), cited in Ereksoussi (2014: 52), states that metaphor, (the term borrowing in Arabic,) consists of three elements: the entity from which we borrow, the entity borrowed, and the entity towhich we borrow. In terms of function of borrowing (metaphor), the medieval Arabic rhetorician Al- Jurjani (d. 1078, cited in Abu Deeb 1971) explains that we borrow something from one concept to another in order to highlight certain imagery or a point of similarity. Therefore, there must be a cognitive relationship (an area of cognitive