Recreating Tone in Two Arabic Translations of Landay Poetry

Abstract

Tone is the way the author expresses an attitude toward the subject. Tone often poses a challenge for translators. The present study is comparative as it explored two Arabic translations of the same Afghan Women's Poetry (Landay). The first translation was done by Jamil Salah in 2002 from the French collection Le suicide et le chant, and the second by Abdallah Abushmaes in 2018 from the English Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women's Poetry. The study aimed at identifying the strategies employed by the two translators to convey the tone expressed in Landay poems, and determining their effectiveness in transferring it into Arabic. The study shows that the two translators adopted different strategies at the word and structure levels which in some cases overlooked the significance of tone, while in other cases they seemed to recreate a similar tone..