The Effect of Semantic Horizon on Reading the Translations of the Novel “Season of Migration to the North”

Aesthetic theory is one of the theories in the field of literary criticism that was developed by the followers of the German school of Constance under the influence of the school of phenomenology. Since this theory focuses on the reader and his perception of the work, it seeks to examine the multiplicity of horizons in the reception process based on the translators' strategies and their interpretations of reading the text. The novel "Season of Migration to the North" by the Sudanese writer Al-Tayyib Saleh is one of the best novels of the twentieth century and has a high literary status. This research, which is organized by the descriptive-analytical method and confrontational approach with the aim of explaining the uncertainty of meaning and the reader's activity in reading the text, has investigated the various semantic readings of this novel based on the aesthetic theory of receiving at three levels of words, phrases, and structure in three translations of Davis (Arabic-English), Ghabraei (English-Persian), and Ameri (Arabic-Persian), and examined how to accept the text on the basis of establishing the artistic position of the work in different horizons and its richness from one translator to another. The result showed that a reader who, in response to white spaces and gaps, interprets and updates the text in a natural way and provides an explicit reading in accordance with the rules of the target language, can overcome the aesthetics of the target text. Accordingly, Ghabraei as a reader has been able to move from a simple reading to a critical understanding by filling in the gaps in accordance with the spirit of a culture. His participation in the reading process, relying on his semantic horizon, has both preserved the beauty of the source text and added to the aesthetic components of the target text.