Abstract
The linguistic and cultural differences between Arabic and English make the translation of any literary work a hard task. This will be more difficult if the focus of translation is on one of Shakespeare's masterpieces. This paper investigates the issue of translating humor, from English into Arabic, in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The study attempts to explore how Arab translators perceive Verbally Expressed Humor and express it in Arabic. The paper applies some linguistic tools in the analysis of humor in both the English and the Arabic versions. This linguistic approach attempts to find out how well the translators were able to render the meanings of “malapropism”, “bombast” and “moon imageries” into Arabic, and to show the dynamics of the comical dimensions in both languages. The discussion has focused on the interactional relations between the two texts to answer the question: should the translator adopt or try to resist the conventional imagery? The study revealed that Arabic humor was slightly lower than that of the British, thus implying that translational impact on humor was minimal.
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