Religious Culture in Mutran’s and Jabra’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Date
2018-07-23
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Publisher
An-Najah National University
Abstract
This research is designed in order to examine Jabra’s and Mutran’s translations of religious cultural traits in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and to study the impact of foreignization and domestication on their translations of Hamlet. In addition, this study will provide 11 subcategories of religious cultural traits and find strategies to scrutinize Jabra’s and Mutran’s translations of religious culture in the play. This research follows a descriptive, quantitative approach where the collected data is taken from the selected English ST in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2002), followed by two selected target texts of Jabra’s (1959) and Mutran’s (2013) given translations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Following Dickins’, Hervey’s and Higgins’ scale of ‘cultural transposition’, Hervey’s and Higgins’ model of translating proper names and ‘the triple-analytical model’ , this study reveals that Mutran domesticates or Arabizes Hamlet by employing Quranic intertextuality. In addition, this study shows that Mutran undermines his purpose of translation by moving the target reader to the source text. In contrast to Mutran's adherence to the target culture, Jabra perceives Shakespeare's texts including Hamlet as theological ones which demand a faithful translation. However, he undermines his doctrine of faithful translation by moving the source text to the target audience. While both translators are affected by their religious culture – Christianity and Islam – which punctuate their translations, the study concludes that faithful translation is contradictory in terms.