The Strategies for Translating Metaphors and Similes in three Persian Translations of Shakespeare's Macbeth

Metaphor and simile are two figures of speech widely used by Shakespeare in his great tragedy, Macbeth. In this corpus-based descriptive comparative study, three Persian renderings of Macbeth by Shadman, Pasargadi, and Ashouri were examined. Newmark’s procedures (Newmark, Approaches 88) for translating metaphors and Pierini’s strategies (Pierini 31) for similes were employed as the frameworks of the study. Analyzing 260 randomly selected metaphors and 66 similes based on Morgan’s table of sample size, the researcher concluded that the most frequently used strategies for translating metaphors in the translations were “reproducing the same image” (Newmark’s most preferable strategy), “conversion to sense”, and “replacing the image”, which were mostly observed in Shadman, Pasargadi, and Ashouri’s renderings respectively. Pierini’s suggested strategy, “retention of the same vehicle”, has been mostly applied by Shadman. Chi-square statistical procedure indicated that the difference between the three translators’ applied strategies was not significant for the metaphors and similes.