Every language reflects its own characteristic and different culture, such as Arabic and Malay language. The differences exist in languages and cultures may cause challenges and difficulties to translators when transferring message from one language into another. This study aims to identify cultural words and their classifications in the first chapter of a novel entitled “Zainab”, analyze their meanings between Arabic and Malay, identify the translation methods and the effects that resulted for translating those cultural words. This study applied descriptive and analytical approaches for the purpose of explaining the cultural elements and recognizing the translation methods and effects for their translation in this novel. The document analysis has been chosen as method of data collection for this research. This activity comprised steps of identification, explanation the cultural words and analysis, as well as identifying references, including what were related to the issues of this study and validating the analysis by the experts. The researcher also adopted Newmark’s cultural elements and translation methods (1988) to facilitate the process of analysis. It is found that when analyzing cultural words translated from this novel, various methods were applied for translating those words such as literal translation, cultural equivalence and deletion. In addition, there are several effects for translating those cultural words when using the methods such as conveying the meaning accurately, the meaning became ambiguous,