Contrastive Analysis of Two English Translations of an Old Arabic Poem

Abstract

The present study aimed to provide a contrastive analysis of two English translations of the famous Arabic poem known in English as “Let days do what they will” by Mohammad ibn Idris al-Shafi’i. The two English translations were produced by two different translation scholars in the language pair Arabic and English. The analysis focused on how the translators dealt with the most important features of poetry when translating the Arabic poem into English. Such features included form, meaning, sound and imagery. The findings revealed some similarities and differences in both translations with reference to the above-mentioned features. It is recommended that more research be conducted on either Arabic-English translation of poetry or English-Arabic translation of poetry as this kind of research seems to be relatively scarce.