Diachronic Translation of Figures of Speech in Antara’s Mu’allaqa

Abstract

Translating literary texts is a way to get to know other language-specificities in terms of figurative language, structure, and tone, among others, during the translation process. Since translated texts from a specific period might be seen differently at another period, this study attempts to examine how figures of speech are dealt with diachronically. It particularly examines how they are translated from Arabic into English and what translation procedures were adopted in the process. In doing so, Abdul-Raof’s (2006) classification of figures of speech and Van Doorslaer’s (2007) translation procedures model are followed to describe and compare the translation of certain components of figures of speech of the source texts and the target texts in Antara’s Mu’allaqã. The data are identified, collected, and analyzed manually, using criterion-sampling. The findings reveal that translators have mainly employed ten procedures: paraphrase, compensation, adaptation, literal, modulation, addition, and substitution, whereas borrowing has been used as an additional procedure. The study also reveals that the translated texts have shorter sentences and a lower lexical density; this indicates that the translated texts have become simpler, more straightforward, and less complex in recent decades, which makes the recent translations more functional than the earlier ones.