Translating Syntagmatic Figures of Poetry in Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Arabic

This thesis explores the translation problems that arise when translating the syntagmatic figures of poetry from English into Arabic. In addition, it investigates the relationship be­tween these problems and the translator’s prosodic and stylistic decisions and highlights the extent to which the translation of prosodic figures influences that of schematic fig­ures. It also proposes methods that can prevent such problems in recreative translation of poetry.

Using ten Shakespearean sonnets and two relatively new versions of their recreative trans­lations in Arabic (Mansour 2011 and Enani 2016), the study adopts a text­-oriented ap­proach and employs a model of syntagmatic figures (Leech 1966/2014: 12­23) to iden­tify, classify and analyse the formal poetics of the source text and target text, namely the prosodic and formal schematic figures.

This research reveals that – as a result of violations of metre and variation of form – met­rical disorder is the most prominent problem when translating syntagmatic figures. The findings also demonstrate that the translator’s prosodic and stylistic choices are key con­tributors to metrical disorder in the translations. Furthermore, the prosodic figures chosen by the translators lead to problems in the translation of the source text formal schematic figures. Other factors seem to include the semantic nature of the source text, as well as the grammatical conventions of the target text. Finally, two methods are proposed to prevent metrical disorder: collaborative translation and balanced translation of figures.