Translation Quality Assessment of Metaphors in Omar Khayyam’s Quatrains: Conceptual Metaphor in Focus

This study aimed to evaluate the translation quality of metaphors in Khayyam’s poetry using House’s model and to identify the extent to which the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) use common conceptual metaphors. To this end, 37 metaphors were chosen out of ten quatrains based on purposive sampling. Then, the ST profile was compared to the TT profile and the metaphors were descriptively analyzed and the errors were identified. The results indicated that there were both covert and overt errors in the translation of Omar Khayyam’s quatrains by Fitzgerald. The covert errors were across the dimensions of field, mode, and tenor while the overt errors were due to the mismatches in the denotative meanings of the ST and the TT with substitution and omission being the largest group of overt errors. Moreover, the analysis of the conceptual metaphors between the two texts revealed that there were some shared conceptual metaphors between the ST and the TT. These common conceptual metaphors indicate that both speakers of Persian and English conceptualize reality in the same way despite their belonging to different cultures.