The Unspoken Architecture Of Story: Translating High-Context Worlds In Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies

Abstract

Translating Jokha Alharthi’s Sayyidat al-Qamar (2010) into Celestial Bodies (2018) involves more than linguistic transposition; it requires putting into words a whole mode of thought—it entails a complete cognitive map. Employing Edward T. Hall’s high-context culture paradigm as the central lens, I argue that Alharthi’s novel is structurally and stylistically articulated through the norms of its Omani milieu—a landscape in which meaning is passed down via social knowledge, symbolic implication, and penetrating silence. Rather than take apart this subtextual architecture to suit a low-context readership, the translator Marilyn Booth engineers an elaborate mimetic experience in English. By means of a careful comparative assessment, this research shows how Booth’s reading of the novel’s chronological disjunctions, its culture-derived metaphors, and its strategic pauses are an analysis of learning to interpret. As a result, the English text emerges as an important venue for interaction, not as a neutral medium which masks the translator’s interpretive role and suppress cultural divides to sound natural in English, but as a space in which the reader comes face to face with the cultural, linguistic, interpretive, and structural realities of the original text. The English translation exhibits the pains and pleasures of cross-cultural interpretation and involves readers in the shaping of meaning. It becomes a site where meaning is negotiated, not just given.