An Analysis of Badawi’s and Ramzi’s Arabic Translations of the Speech Act of Compliments in Shakespearean Play ‘King Lear’: A Pragmatic Contrastive Study

Abstract

The current study aims at investigating into the appropriateness of the translations of Badawi and Ramiz of the speech act of compliments of the Shakespearean play 'King Lear'. The researcher applied a content analysis of the original version of the play being compared to the Arabic versions as target texts. 20 texts of compliments are sampled for analysis. The study adopted a pragmatic analysis of the speech act under study with reference to the taxonomy of Al-Mansoob, Patil, and Alrefaee (2019). The analysis taxonomy consists of 20 compliment strategies. There occurred a reasonable number of similarities between the original version of the play and the TTs. 75% of Ramzi’s translations and 65% of Badawi’s translations seemed to be identical to the original contexts in preserving the function of the speech act of compliment in the selected 20 texts. The encountered differences between the ST and each of the target translations are not serious to the extent which could break the function of the original context in the target setting as they appropriately preserved the naturalness and smoothness of approximately more than 80% of the target texts. The translators further assimilated each other in handling the ST compliment strategies to the TL context in 12 of the total 20 complimenting contexts.