Teaching Translation of Poetry: A Collaborative Approach

Abstract

This study explores the application of a collaborative approach to the teaching of poetry translation as a literary genre to university Arabic speaking students. The collaborative approach is applied to the translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII “To His Love” into the Arabic Language. The participants in the experiment are two groups of female students and a Monolingual Arabic Language Specialist (MALS). Additionally, a set of ACNCS criteria were used to assess the quality of the translated texts. The discussion of the results and the qualitative analysis of the poetic extracts used in this paper indicated that the collaborative approach has resulted in improving the quality of students’ translation, as the translated materials proved to be “novel and appropriate” as well as having validity from the MALS. Although this approach has some limitations, it can also be applied by teachers of other literary and none literary texts.