The Impact of Compensation in Translating Classical Arabic Poetry into English: An Analytical Study

Translating classical Arabic poetry into English is inevitablyproblematic. This is due to the uniqueness and exclusiveness of theword and form of the Arabic poetry on the one hand, and to the greatgap between the two languages on the other hand. Some translatorsadopt compensation as a strategy to overcome many difficulties ofmeaning loss in translating such type of texts. The current analyticalstudy attempts to show the impact of using compensation in translatingMuallaqat Emro' Al- Qais into English by adopting Hervey & Higgins'(1992) model. The study ends with some concluding remarks, the mostimportant one among them is that compensation in not necessarily aneffective strategy. On the contrary, it could lead to deepening theunfamiliarity and loss of the semantic precision of the ST in the TT.