Translating Macbeth’s Colour Metaphors Into Arabic: A Revised CMT Approach to Shakespeare’s Creative Metaphors

Abstract

Shakespeare is one of the most translated and retranslated English language authors into Arabic. Ever since the rise of the modern translation movement, translating Shakespeare into Arabic has continued to receive the attention of translators and researchers in the field of translating literature. But most academic and critical research on the translation of Shakespeare into Arabic has focused on the sociocultural implications of the translation process while neglecting aspects related to Shakespeare’s language and thought. One of the multifarious challenges of translating Shakespeare into Arabic is the Bard’s use of creative metaphors which account for the richness, exquisiteness and creativity of Shakespeare’s lexical and conceptual legacy. This paper aims to research one of the restrictions of translating Shakespeare’s creative metaphors in two Arabic translations of Macbeth with specific focus on the colour metaphors of the emotion of fear. The research methods adopt the improved version of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) in identifying, collecting and analysing the tokens in the source and target texts. The study shows that the translation of a creative metaphor into Arabic is influenced by the degree of saliency in the associations between the metaphor’s two conceptual domains. It also concludes that the revised CMT provides a reliable framework for understanding and analysing the communicative function of creative metaphors in discourse. The results also show that the deconstruction of conceptual metaphors back into their basic kernel patterns provides a good but inadequate strategy to translate highly-contextualized uses of creative metaphors in the case of lexical or conceptual restrictions.

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