Shakespeare Subtitle Analysis

Shakespeare Subtitle

Translating Shakespearean text is different to any other literary text. The language of Shakespeare’s era was complex to the modern ear and has a different style of syntax and lexiconic structure from contemporary English. This creates numerous challenges for translators, Baker (2011: 265) states that, translating Shakespeare involves various technical and linguistics problems to the translator such as, textual issues, ambiguous cultural hints, neologisms and archaisms and so on. One of the issues I had to deal with was the fact that the SL contained some old English word such as hath, nay and liom which I did not understand in the beginning, however, after an extensive search in online dictionaries their semantic meanings

Newmark (1981) defines a metaphor as " any figurative expression: the transferred sense of a physical word (native as 'to originate’, its most common meaning); the personification of an abstraction, the application of a word or collocation to what it does not literally denote, i.e., to describe one thing in terms of another. All polysemous words and most English phrasal verbs are potentially metaphorical ". According to Newmark (1988) and the classification of metaphor types, most of the ST metaphors are original metaphors, and were cited by the ST writer. Thus, I resorted to Newmark Literal strategy (1988:129) to create equal image in the TT, "these should be translated literally, whether they are universal, cultural or obscurely subjective. Since original metaphors (a) contain the core of an important writer's message, his personality, his comment on life, and though they may have a more or less a cultural element, these have to be transferred neatly; (b) such metaphors are a source of enrichment for the target language" (Newmark. 1988:129). With some metaphors, I was unable to translate each word into the TT in accordance with Newmark strategy; they would not have sounded natural in Arabic and would have appeared awkward and unfamiliar

Since semantic translation has a greater focus on the aesthetic value of the ST, the literal translation cannot be used solely in literary translations, however, Newmark stated in 1988 that the ideal method to be applied when translating figurative language and literature was a literal translation. Since that time, it has been argued that a translator must focus on the aesthetic features of the ST by using the equivalent methods approach. In this regard, (Vinay and Darbelnet,1995Cited in Haque, 2012) considered equivalence as a method that “replicates the same situations in the original, whilst using completely different wording” (p. 342). They emphasise that the ideal technique to applied by the translator, when dealing with idioms, proverbs, and animal sounds, is