Strategies used in translating poetic discourse from english into arabic.

Abstract

Translating poetry has been subject to debates for centuries and is still causing a lot of controversies. Many scholars point out the difficulty of translating poetry either from English into Arabic or vice versa. Some of them claim that poetry is untranslatable and it is needless for the translator to try because when poetry is translated, it may lose its aesthetics. Others emphasize on the translatability of poetry by using some strategies which swing between foreignising, i.e., sticking strongly to the rules of the source language, and domesticating, i.e., submitting or adapting the rules of the source language to those of the target language. In this connection, the present research work aims to find out which strategies suit best the translation of poetry and which modifications should be made to the source text in order to transmit poetic discourse with all its linguistic, stylistic, semantic aspects and its aesthetics from English into Arabic. For this purpose, a set of parallel corpora composed of English and Arabic of Robert Frost's poetry have been selected and analyzed cross-linguistically in order to find out the strategies used by translators to render poetry from English into Arabic. The two versions have been analysed quantitatively and qualitatively taking all the poetic aspects such as the words, the tone, and the images into consideration. Moreover, some cultural gaps which may put professional translators in troubles have been taken into account. Besides, we tried to drive out the myth of the untranslatability of poetic discourse through a test which was administered to a group composed of thirty fourth year translation students and four professional translators. In addition, a questionnaire was given to thirteen translation teachers in order to back up the hypotheses. The results revealed that the process of translation is not only a linguistic transfer, but it is also a cultural transfer, hence poetry translation should take the cultural aspects of both the source language and the target language into account.