Challenges and Strategies in Translating Linguistic Taboos: A Comparative Analysis of Jojo Moyes' Me before You in English and Arabic

Linguistic taboo is a universal phenomenon that suggests that almost all languages have words and expressions that are forbidden to be used. People use such unsuitable expressions for humor, catharsis, or even to manifest one's power.

There are certain sets of taboo expressions that are forbidden in almost all languages, while other expressions vary in their strength from one language to another according to the cultural differenceThe two languages under investigation (English and Arabic) are culturally different, which might make an expression taboo in one language but not in the other.Therefore, this paper explores the Arabic and English linguistic taboos based on the theories of context and cross-cultural communication. The main objective of the study is to explore all the linguistic taboos used in Jojo Moyes' "Me before You" and the way these expressions were rendered into Arabic by "Amany Lazar" in أنا قبلك /ʔana qabluk/

A descriptive research design was adopted; the data collection was carried out by manually gathering taboo expressions used in the source text novel and its equivalent target text.

Throughout analyzing the English taboo expressions and their Arabic translations, different strategies of translating taboo words from one language into another are presented to find out the strategy the translator tends to use the most in translating Jojo Moyes' taboo expressions.