Translating Idiolects and Sociolects in Marcel Pagnol’s La Gloire de mon père and Le Château de ma mère

This paper investigates the difficulty of translating idiolects and sociolects from French into Arabic, and how the translator tackles obstacles encountered when trying to recreate their effects. We sought to focus on linguistic aspects pertaining to them, such as the accent, the pronunciation, the regiolect and the orality, which could embody them. We chose a meridional French literary work, which perfectly depicts the local colour of Provence, through its prolific use of idiolects and sociolects. The difficulty of rendering those notions was noticeable when we analyzed the translation of some sentences, which best represent them in Marcel Pagnol's La Gloire de mon père and Le Château de ma mère. We could ascertain that both phenomena are interrelated. This is challenging since it is impossible to demarcate their aspects. Thus, their transfer is sometimes scarcely possible and doomed to fail, as they are differently achieved, or inexistent in the target culture.