Investigating Figurative Language in Edward Fitzgerald’s Translation of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam According to Newmark’s Model

Translation is essentially an art, however, it does not mean that translation is purely spontaneous and intuitive. Similar to other arts, translation can be learned and improved by an awareness of the translation methods and, of course, by practice. The knowledge about translation has increased during the few past decades. Translation study has huge and massive body which is still growing. One particular branch in translation study is translation of poetry. Figures of speech are said to be at the heart of poetry. This study investigates translation of figures of speech in Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat using Newmark’s model. In his book, Translation Strategy (1988), Newmark elaborates on ways to translate figures of speech and presents seven strategies to render a figures of speech into another language. Utilizing Peter Newmark’s strategies, this study examines Fitzgerald’s rendering of the main figure of speech, metaphor, to see how close or how far Fitzgerald’s rendering is to the original text. The results of this research suggest that there is a high degree of correlation between the images of the original text and the translated one. There is also a significant degree of faithfulness in translating the main figure of speech, metaphor, in FitzGerald’s translation of Rubaiyat Omar Khayyam based on Newmark’s model.