On Translating English Sports Nicknames into Arabic

Abstract

Nowadays, the transfer of English sports nicknames invades the Arabic sports reporting which tends to make much use of them. These nicknames are frequently used to dub players, clubs, stadiums, coaches, etc. that sometimes their original names are no longer used by journalists, commentators or fans. Thus, it seems very interesting to deal with such brand- new field full of twists and turns, oddities and quiddities. The transfer of nicknames may seem easy which is not true for it poses crucial problems for translators owing to the fact that they reflect not only the English culture and language but also even other ones like Italian, Spanish, etc. That is also due to the phenomenon of globalization of such sports as soccer, tennis, baseball and so on. This requires the translator to gauge the target language (TL) familiarity before adopting any translation strategy. At the outset and before embarking upon discussing the translation strategies proposed for sports nicknames, the present researcher finds it worth while to put these nicknames under the microscope, giving her classifications of them. Moreover the paper examines relevant issues: language of sports (LS) and translator versus (vs.) knowledge. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the study is limited to investigate nicknames in two sports, viz. football and tennis