The Impact of Compensation in Translating Classical Arabic Poetry into English: An Analytical Study
Kawkab Salim Mohammed
Lecturer College of Education, Al- Hamdaniya University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/jls.1.4.5
Keywords: Problematic Translating Arabic poetry
Abstract
Translating classical Arabic poetry into English is inevitably
problematic. This is due to the uniqueness and exclusiveness of the
word and form of the Arabic poetry on the one hand, and to the great
gap between the two languages on the other hand. Some translators
adopt compensation as a strategy to overcome many difficulties of
meaning loss in translating such type of texts. The current analytical
study attempts to show the impact of using compensation in translating
Muallaqat Emro' Al- Qais into English by adopting Hervey & Higgins'
(1992) model. The study ends with some concluding remarks, the most
important one among them is that compensation in not necessarily an
effective strategy. On the contrary, it could lead to deepening the
unfamiliarity and loss of the semantic precision of the ST in the TT.
