This presentation highlights a number of strategies for overcoming challenges which AFL students encounter in the advanced translation class as they attempt to render into English religious references, allusions and expressions occurring in Arabic literary texts. The challenges arise as such terms almost invariably encompass a host of meanings beyond the lexical and syntactic, often reflecting an entire worldview integral to Arabic culture in a single phrase. The students are therefore sensitized to the fact that a successful rendering across the two disparate languages may be achieved only when “the translator takes into account not only the equivalence of meaning, but also investigates higher levels of content, context, semantics and pragmatics.” (Al-Masri, 2011, p. 29). This process of unpacking the various layers of meaning is conducted through a close reading of a short story by preeminent Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, from his “Stories from Our Alley” collection, selected for abounding with such religious terms. Also, as a miniature literary work, it constitutes an organic whole, as it were, providing the sort of coherent context required to explore with the class the most precise denotation, as well as the subtle connotations of each of these terms, in accordance with the concepts of equivalence/non-equivalence in translation theory (Baker, 2011). And given how quintessentially culture-specific the terms in question are, the two broad translation approaches of foreignization vs. domestication become of particular relevance and are systematically brought to bear on the discussion. The presenter shares how the resultant categories of cultural approximation, among others, guide students towards the sort of in-depth analysis necessary to impart to them the nuanced understanding of the language and insight into its ethos that are vital to making the leap from the advanced to the superior level of proficiency. To corroborate the effectiveness of this teaching practice, samples from students’ translations of religious terms and allusions pre and post discussion will be shared, demonstrating how class consensus is formed as to the final English rendering, put forward as the closest match to the Arabic, and shown to be the result of the proposed teaching strategies and activities. References Baker, M. (2011.) In Other Words; A Coursebook on Translation. New York, USA: Routledge Press. Al-Masri, H. (2011). The Difficulty of Translating Modern Arabic Literature for the Western World. New York, USA: Edwin Mellen Press.