Linguistic and Cultural Compensation in Translating Poetry: Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Arabic and Jahin’s Quatrains in English

Abstract

The present study highlights the concept of compensation as a translation technique applied to some selected translated poems from English into Arabic and vice versa. Due to the linguistic and cultural divergence between English and Arabic, an inevitable loss occurs at linguistic, stylistic, and cultural levels during rendering the poetic discourse. For the purpose of the study, a set of Shakespeare’s sonnets translated by Enani (2016) and Jahin’s quatrains translated by Nahed Salem (2009) and their Arabic and English counterparts are utilised, respectively. The study scrutinises the various forms of compensation from a translational perspective. This dissertation is engaged in a micro-linguistic analysis of the translated poems in terms of compensation to show the impact in order to patch up the hurdles of loss encountered in translating such a unique and exclusive literary genre. In terms of compensation, the analysis shows how the linguistic and cultural properties of the target language have been shaped, changed, and transferred, as compared to the source language. Thus, the study investigates the linguistic and cultural losses detected by scrutinising the translated sonnets in Arabic and the quatrains in English, how does compensation apply in the translation of the sonnets and the quatrains; and how does compensation differ between rendering Shakespeare’s sonnets and Jahin’s quatrains. Therefore, this study adopts a descriptive method by means of analysing and examining the collected data in terms of Hervey and Higgins’s (1992) model of compensation techniques. The results show that loss could be inevitable or avertable. Although compensation itself is categorised as one of the oblique translation techniques, it has been implemented by a combination of direct and oblique translation techniques, such as literal, modulation, adaptation, and expansion. Furtherly, the translator’s attitudes of his culture and religious background affected the target product greatly, as reflected in the translator’s intended choices in transferring the culture specific reference entailed in the Shakespearian sonnets. Likewise, the poet’s cultural and religious background influenced the poems before translation as obviously detected in Jahin’s quatrains. This illustrates how the linguistic and cultural norms of each language had a great impact on both the poet and the translator.