Tracing Loss and Gain in Translating Ambiguity and Culture in Shakespeare’s Macbeth from English to Arabic

چکیده

Ambiguity plays a primordial role in literature as it is heavily attached to the culture of the source text. Poets employ it in their texts to communicate both language and culture, but translating the literary text’s ambiguity is not of that ease.  Ambiguity poses many problems and difficulties resulted out of the difference between language and culture of the source text and target text, what causes a big loss in meaning during transfer. In order to preserve both the aesthetic form and the suspense ambiguity creates in the literary text, this paper intends to discuss the main strategies translators should deploy while translating a literary text to preserve its ambiguities and avoid a big loss in meaning. Following a comparative method, this paper analyses and compares some passages extracted from Djabra Djabra Ibrahim (2008) and Amin Hussein Ahmed (1994) Arabic translations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  The analysis reveals that in order to avoid loss in translation, translators have to rely on specific strategies such as: literal translation, domestication and neutralization to preserve the text’s communicative purpose to the target reader, and make their translations faithful to the source text.