The Translation of Swearwords in Shakespeare’s Hamlet into Arabic: A Pragmatic Perspective

Abstract

The stigmatized nature of swearing expressions renders their intrlingual/intercultural transference a problematic issue in translation. This stems from the fact that cultures differ in their tolerance of the use of swearing expressions. Accordingly, in the act of intrlingual/intercultural transference, translators adopt certain translation strategies to carefully handle the sensitive issue of such expressions. However, although the choice of a particular strategy is influenced by different ideological, cultural and contextual factors, there is a consensus that swearing expressions are either toned down or completely deleted. In light of this, this study attempts to identify the translation strategies adopted by two Arab (male and female) translators when rendering such expressions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet into Arabic. The aim is to examine whether gender has a role to play in determining the translator’s orientation either for domestication or foreignization. To achieve this objective, a corpus consisting of Hamlet’s original text and two translations of it in Arabic is collated. Moreover, in the analysis of the translation strategies Vermeer’s (1978/2000) Skopostheorie is utilized and Venuti’s (1995) model of ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ is adopted to determine the overall translation behavior of the translators as being either source text/culture oriented or target text/culture oriented. The findings of the study indicate that the translators have adopted a number of domestication translation strategies including deletion, de-swearing, ambiguity and generalization to abide by cultural norms in the target culture and a number of foreignization strategies including changing non-swearwords to swearwords, over-translation (over-swearing), and literal translation to preserve the spirit of the source text. However, in comparison with the male translator, the female translator was more risk aversive when it comes to making translation decisions, a fact which might be attributed to her little experience in literary translation. Hence, she was more faithful to the source text.