Ambiguity in Poetry: A Comparative Analysis of Arabic Translations of Emily Dickinson’s “Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant”
Abstract
This study examined lexical and referential ambiguity in Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” along with the ways that translators Mohammed Alsharawy, Mahmoud Masoud, and Ahmed Alshalan translated those types of ambiguities from English into Arabic. Using Lucía Molina and Hurtado Albir’s (2002) model, the study compared the three Arabic translations in terms of how they utilized strategies to translate the ambiguous verses. A comparative-descriptive-analytical methodology was applied to accomplish the objective of the study via a two-fold approach: a quantitative analysis of four major lexical and referential ambiguities, and a qualitative stylistic analysis of the entire poem to evaluate the translators’ overall interpretations of Dickinson’s imagery. To examine how often the translators used different strategies to interpret ambiguous words and references in Dickinson’s poem, we constructed a pie chart of their usage. Of the strategies used, explanatory procedures (amplification and compensation) constituted approximately 64%, while literal translation accounted for approximately 36%. Tables comparing the translations demonstrated a combination of methods used by the translators, highlighting the absence of a universal approach to translating ambiguous English words and references into Arabic.