The essence of poetry translation : prosodic features and their effect on English-Arabic translation

Abstract EN

The difficulty of translating poetry rises from its specificity because it comprises in its verses all instances of difficulty that exist in a language whether aesthetic, grammatical, linguistic or cultural.

Amongst these features, there are the prosodic features: the sounds which play a great role in meaning.

Generally, the effect of these sounds is implicit and it is the role of the translator to cater for it in translation.

For the sake of knowing the effect of prosodic features in translation, we attempt in this paper to see what the most frequent prosodic features are, the extent to which they affect the transmitted message with emphasis on their role in poetry.

This is done through some suggested procedures which may be considered as solutions to problems encountered when translating phonological aspects of poetic texts from English into Arabic.