Translation of metaphor in literature : “The I. O. U" short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, as an example

Abstract EN

The ultimate objective of this study is to show some of the contributions of M.B.

Dagut’s article, “Can Metaphor be translated, to the actual act of translating between two languages that are culturally distant, such as Arabic and English.

To this end, the study has analyzed some translated segments of a short story, “The I.O.U” by F.

Scott Fitzgerald, comparing the English source text to the Arabic target text, based on M.B.

Dagut’s article “Can Metaphor be translated?” (1976).

It is about the intercultural translation of metaphors.

First, he recognizes the central role of this phenomenon in everyday language and then, he asks himself if it is possible to translate it without problems, or it can be used as a theoretical framework to analyze certain socio-cultural experiences encoded linguistically in a text, regardless of the language itself.

He is the first scholar who deals with this theme in a very clear way, allowing foreign languages students to deepen this interesting topic.

It has been shown that in order to produce an accurate interpretation for a metaphorical expression in a text, it is not enough to pay attention to the very direct meaning, but to the indirect meaning and time lapse that the text may imply.

The study highlights the kinds and theories of metaphor and the best strategies that scholars applied to get best-translated texts.

It also defines the Metaphor term in accordance with the famous scholars who dealt with it by applying their strategies on the translation of the short story “The I.O.U” by F.

Scott Fitzgerald.