A Study of Metaphor Equivalents in the Five Persian Translations of William Shakespeareâ€™s Hamlet

Marjan Salehi Chakousari; Somaiyeh Alipour Kakroudi

Volume : IV, Issue : VI, June - 2014

A Study of Metaphor Equivalents in the Five Persian Translations of William Shakespeareâ€™s Hamlet

Marjan Salehi Chakousari, Somaiyeh Alipour Kakroudi

Abstract :

The play Hamlet is a story of Danish Royal Family, which is written by William Shakespeare in 1601. After the kings death, the familys relation is disturbed. Their dialogues are full of irony and literary elements in the play which increases its aesthetic aspects and difficulty of understanding. Hamlet also got popular in Iran and different translators tried to render this masterpiece into Persian language. There are eight Persian translations of Hamlet in Iran. Masoud Farzad, Ala–Addin Pazargadi, Mahmood Etamad Zadeh(M.A. Behazin), Dariush Shahin, Esmail Fasih, Mostafa Rahimi, Mir Shams–Addin Adib Soltani, and Arash Kheir Abadi have translated it. Hamlet is full of metaphors, this feature concerned the researchers. The researchers studied five Persian translations of Hamlet according to seven ways Peter Newmark has suggested in his book Approaches to Translation (1988). Three samples were chosen to examine whether the metaphors were conveyable into Persian language or not. The essay came to the conclusion that English metaphors can be translated metaphorically.