A Translation Criticism of Three Arabic Equivalent Versions for William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud": Problematic Translation Strategies and Rhetorical Discrepancies

Document Type : Original Article

Author

English Language Department, Al-Noor University College, Mosul, Iraq.

Abstract

William Wordsworth is a very famous English poet; he devoted his works to humanity and nature. His poems are full of humanitarian feelings towards wars and societal crises.
The chosen words are integrated with the music of the poetry (meters), beside the embedded emotions in the self of the reader.
The problem of Translation gives rise to:

How can a competent translator give access to the readers to conceptualize the feelings of the original poet?
Do we need another Arab poet to do and complete such a task?

The depiction of things by depending on rhetorical devices is one of the most influential styles which are heavily employed by Wordsworth.
This study tries to measure critically the works of three famous Arab translators during their endeavour to give an equivalent Arabic counterpart to an SL poem full of loneliness, astonishment and purification.
The study highlights some rhetorical discrepancies between the original and translation versions due to the cultural and linguistic gap between Arabic and English. The translations are insufficient as they lack the sense of imagination, and this is ascribed to the translator's inappropriate application of translation strategies and translation theories.

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