Macbeth in Arabic Translation A cultural Comparative Approach

This paper provides a comparative analysis that maps out the various translation strategies employed by each translator to render the linguistic, cultural, and, therefore, the aesthetic context of the source text into the target text. As will be seen, Jabra, Amin and Mutran employ various sets of strategies to create a transparent text where the structures are as close as possible to those used by the target reader when using Modern Standard Arabic. On a structural level, the three translators tend to adhere to the sentence structure of the target language. Since Jabra’s, Mutran’s and Amin’s translation strategies depend on the type of the culture-specific item, this study argues that functional equivalence, literal translation, and domestication, or neutralization, are more or less the most common translation strategies employed by the three translators. These strategies are meant to achieve the linguistic, or the formal equivalence, maintaining the communicative function of the source text rather than preserving its cultural identity.