The Translation of Sexual Puns in Shakespeare’s Hamlet into Arabic

Abstract

Puns in Shakespeare’s plays are of great artistic significance. They endow and enrich these plays with secondary and even tertiary meanings. However, because of the double or triple-tiered meanings of puns, these stylistic devices are not easily amenable to translation. The rich cultural connotations behind puns and the distinctive features of the puns’ form, sound and meanings pose great challenges to translators. Accordingly, care should be taken in the interlingual/intercultural transference of puns to transfer the effect achieved by these devices on the source recipients to the target recipients. Any mistranslation of puns will leave bad consequences on the recipients’ comprehension of the play’s atmosphere and characterization. In light of this, this study aims at identifying the strategies adopted by six Arab translators when rendering sexual puns in Shakespeare’s Hamlet into Arabic and the effect of each strategy on maintaining the intended communicative effect of puns on the recipients. In the analysis of the translation of puns in the Arabic versions of the play, Delabastita’s (2004) model was considered as the main theoretical framework. The data for analysis were collated from the play and its translated versions in Arabic by identifying puns in the ST and their counterparts in the TTs. The findings of the study show that the pun-to-pun, pun-to-zero-pun and pun-to-non-pun strategies were adopted when rendering puns in Hamlet into Arabic to naturalize the play to the Arab recipients, although this was at the expense of preserving the intended functions and communicative effect of this important stylistic feature.