Compensation Strategies Adopted by Translators for Rendering Figurative Language in Some Selected Shakespearean Plays: A Cultural Approach

Abstract

The study demonstrates the figurative barrier in three Arabic translations of three of Shakespeare’s great tragedies; namely, Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. The three translators whose works have been studied are Khalil Mutran, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Mohamed Enani. Through the contrastive analysis of the three Arabic translations of each play, the study presents an evaluation of the compensation strategies opted for to achieve the purpose of a specific figure of speech with a special focus on cultural translatability. The evaluation is guided by the skopos theory laid down by Hans Vermeer, and the compensation strategies postulated by James Dickens, Sandor Hervey and Ian Higgins. The thesis addresses three fundamental issues about the Arabic translation of Shakespeare's works: translation loss and cultural untranslatability, effectiveness and applicability of compensation strategies and the controversy on whether formal (linguistic) or functional (skopos) is more applicable to the translation of Shakespeare’s figures of speech.