Literature Review on the Translation of Malay Novels into Arabic

Translating literary works is a challenging and difficult task. This is because a literary genre gives emphasis to the aspect of language beauty that contains many elements of hidden meaning. Let alone the translation process involves translations from Malay into Arabic. In Malaysia, there are books written in Malay which have been translated into Arabic representing very small numbers based on the data acquired from Institute of Translation and Book Malaysia (ITBM) since 1995 till 2012. This study intends to put forward recent researches besides identifying the gap that scholars have not looked into in order to produce a new research. Having undertaken the investigation, there are many researches in the field of translation involving translations from foreign languages into Malay such as Thai-Malay, Chinese-Malay, Arab-Malay, French-Malay. Meantime, studies on translations from Malay into foreign languages seem rare. Researches ever to be attended are Malay-French and Malay-German translations. This rarity can be taken as problem statement for further research.