Analysis of Deforming Tendencies in Mohammad Noureddine's Arabic Translation of Khayyam's Quatrains Based on the View of Antoine Berman

Abstract

Khayyam's quatrains contain fundamental questions about man and existence that have attracted the readers’ attention and caused them to translate into many languages. Mohammad Noureddine is one of the translators who have translated Khayyam's quatrains into Arabic. He has sometimes undergone deforming changes based on the beliefs and ideas in his society in transmitting the concepts of quatrains to Arabic. Antoine Berman emphasizes that the translation of any foreign text should keep its strangeness in the target language, and any deletion, addition, or change should be considered as the distortion of the original text. This paper adopts a descriptive-analytical method to analyze the deforming tendencies in Mohammad Noureddine's translation of Khayyam's quatrains based on Antoine Berman's theory and examines seven deforming tendencies, which are rationalization, clarification, redundancy, boastfulness, qualitative weakening of the text, quantitative weakening of the text and destruction of the subtextual semantic network to determine the degree of Mohammad Noureddine's adherence to the source text and his success in conveying concepts and meanings. Findings indicate that the translator weakens the quantity and quality of the text by avoiding translating some words or choosing an equivalent that does not reach the level of the source word in terms of semantic richness, and he has tried to rationalize by changing the structure of sentences and punctuation. It has turned to clarification and boastfulness by adding explanations to the text and the tendency to beautify the destination text. Moreover, he has used his mystical and social thoughts in it through the changes in meanings and concepts.

Keywords

• khayyam's quatrains
• translation
• deforming tendencies
• antoine berman
• mohammad noureddine