A cross-cultural study of metaphoric imagery in Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Metaphor is an important literary device, and its translation poses the challenge of switching between different cultural, conceptual, and linguistic frames of reference. This study uses cross-cultural comparison to investigate the metaphoric imagery used in six translations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth into three languages: French, Italian, and Persian. To accomplish the aims of the study, metaphoric images in this play were identified in the source and target texts and then subjected to comparative analysis using Newmark’s categorization of strategies for translating metaphors. After analyzing the translations in the above-mentioned languages, it became apparent that all the translators, including the two Persian translators, tended to retain the same metaphoric images as in the source text. This is somewhat surprising given the greater linguistic and cultural distance between English and Persian. The findings suggest that the literal treatment of metaphors — and not their explicitation — may be a translation universal, at least in regard to canonical texts.