Teaching Translation: Focus on translatability or Untranslatability of poem

Translation of Poetry has been a much debated issue since olden times, with many pros and cons and dichotomist reasoning as to its Possibility or impossibility. Poetry translation is the most controversial issue caused by the existing conflict between form and content and also high figurative language of poetry Translating literary works is actually so central to translation studies that without it much of the world's best literary works would be lost to us. The present study is an attempt to investigate the poetic translation assessment at extra textual level. Twenty translation students from Vali-e-Asr university of Rafsanjan and some poems by different poets chose accidentally in the study. It is tried to show that how linguistic and extra-linguistic features of the original poem has been dealt with in the translation process. The study showed that, most problematic part of Poem translation is form translation. So Alliteration, Assonance, Rhyme, etc., which are related to form are most untranslatable parts of Poem translation. The results confirm that nearly all the translators have translated the poems as word for word rendering. Finally, as long as you are still seeing features, of form and expression and meaning, as separate problems, you are not yet ready to translate.

Keywords:

Poetry , Translatability , Untranslatability