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153748

The Translatability of Prosody: A case study of English/Arabic Poetry

Article

Last updated: 05 Jan 2025

Subjects

-

Tags

اللُّغويات والآداب

Abstract

This paper investigates the translatability of prosody by showing the difficulty of translating the prosodic features from English into Arabic, illustrated with English/ Arabic examples. The current study is intended to show that prosody presents a challenge for translators in translating the poetic text from English into Arabic due to the great differences between the two linguistic systems. The dictionary definition of rhythm is the regular occurrence of sounds, that is the sonic pattern created by successive variously intonated units of speech, mainly by using syllables usually stressed and unstressed in a certain order, in European languages, such as English, French and German. In Arabic we have units of consonants and vowels, rather than syllables, with less consideration for intonation. So, while we have in English a line consisting of a number of successive syllables creating units of one unstressed followed a stressed syllable, in Arabic we have units consisting of one, two, or more consonants followed by a vowel. This paper concludes that failure to preserve prosodic features such as rhythm, meter, and rhyme is due to the employed strategy that the translator used either to translate the poetic text into verse or prose style.

DOI

10.21608/mjoms.2021.153748

Keywords

prosody, NrhythmN, consonantsN - vowels, syllables, stressed - unstressed

Authors

First Name

Aya

Last Name

Awad Shehata Mabruk

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Fayoum University.

Email

aa208@fayoum.edu.eg

City

الفيوم

Orcid

-

Volume

1

Article Issue

العدد 1 (اللغويات والآداب)

Related Issue

22636

Issue Date

2021-01-01

Receive Date

2021-03-05

Publish Date

2021-01-01

Page Start

286

Page End

305

Print ISSN

2735-5861

Online ISSN

2735-587X

Link

https://mjoms.journals.ekb.eg/article_153748.html

Detail API

https://mjoms.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=153748

Order

5

Type

البحوث والدِّراسات.

Type Code

1,755

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

مجلة جامعة مصر للدراسات الإنسانية

Publication Link

https://mjoms.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

The Translatability of Prosody: A case study of English/Arabic Poetry

Details

Type

Article

Created At

23 Jan 2023