A RELEVANCE-THEORETIC ASSESSMENT OF ARABIC TRANSLATION QUALITY OF SELECTED SHAKESPEAR'S HAMLET'S RIDDLES

Abstract

Translating riddles may be regarded as a problem that encounters a translator, especially in a literary text; then, the quality of the translation may hinder the reader’s comprehension of the target text. The problem arises when the target text lacks a humorous effect on readers, hence it is less relevant to the target language. Therefore, this descriptive qualitative study aimed to assess the translation quality of riddles from English into Arabic from a relevance-theoretic perspective. According to relevance theory, translation quality is determined by searching for and achieving the optimal relevance between the target and the source text. Thus, the translation of riddles is considered a process for reaching optimal relevance of humour in the riddles between the source text and the target audience. To this end, five sample riddles were selected from Shakespeare's Hamlet and two versions of Arabic translations of this play, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Khalil Mutran. The findings showed Jabra’s translation achieves a more powerful communicative effect with less cognitive effort than Mutran's, meaning that it is more effective in maintaining explicit and implicit content. Mutran’s translation, though creative, is less effective in understanding the meaning of the target text as the reader exerts more cognitive effort with less communicative effect. This means that trying to fit one's target language conventions to the source language conventions would decrease the relevance of the source text to the target one and would not maintain the explicit and implicit content of the source text.