The research addresses the problematic of the Arabic critical term and its relation to its Western counterpart, and then reveals the trend of the term poetic image that has symbolic/Western origins, works to adapt it within Arabic terminology, and monitors alternative terms for it such as the term artistic image, as the latter led to a critical debate. The research relied on the descriptive approach based on the mechanisms of analysis and induction. The research also raised several problems, including: Is the crisis that the Arab critical term went through during its contact with the other/the West real or fabricated? Is the term poetic image the only term that can contain the term image artistic?.

Terminology crisis; foreign term; Arabic term; Translation; poetic image; artistic photo; Terminological chaos; Terminological richness.