The Kurdish Translation of English Collocations in Shakespeare’s the Tempest

Abstract

Collocations have always been an area of interest for linguists. They study this phenomenon in both translation and language dimensions. The way of using collocations in a source text and the way of translating them are important keys to indicate a text’s linguistic, stylistic and cultural features. It is beyond doubt that collocations are essential word combinations that enhance the pragmatic appeal of a text. More specifically, literary authors use collocations to make the language of their literary works more figurative. Therefore, translators need to be careful enough during their translation process in order to preserve the uniqueness of a language. The present article aims to study those English collocations in literary texts that are translated into Kurdish. To achieve the objective of the study, the researcher takes account of William Shakespeare’s famous play (The Tempest) that is translated into Kurdish by Dr.Azad Hama Sharif who is a famous Kurdish translator. For the same purpose 59 collocations that are used in that literary work are chosen to be the data of the study. Then the selected collocations are classified according to the strategies that are used to translate them. Moreover, the frequency of using each strategy is also presented. The article explores an explicit analysis of translating those collocations from the source into the target language by using Vinay and Darblen’s model of translation. It also delineates that claque is the most used translation strategy and modulation is the least used strategy.