Austin’s Speech Act Theory on Four Translations of Macbeth

Document Type : Academic scientific reviews of any other material related to the main domains of this Journal.

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Lecturer in English Literature Qena Faculty of Arts South Valley University

Abstract

Published in 1965, J. L. Austin’s Speech Acts theory made a groundbreaking contribution to the field of pragmatics and semantics. The Speech Acts theory suggests that communication acts fall into three categories: locution, illocution, and perlocution. This theory adds a new dimension to utterances that supersedes the narrow definition of meaning and sense in linguistic communication. This paper aims to analyze Austin's Speech Act theory through four different translated versions of Shakespeare’s dramatic work, Macbeth, respectively authored by Mutran (1917); Abu Hadid (1934); Jabra (1979); and, Enani (2005). The three notions of locution, illocution, and perlocution are key components in the present framework to describe the approach each of the four translators in rendering the legendary Shakespearean text into Arabic. In attempting to achieve "sameness in meaning," each of the four translators demonstrates his own distinctive approach in light of Austin's Speech Act theory: Mutran’s and Abu Hadid’s locutionary perspective led to some distortion of the intended meaning in the source text.  Conversely, Jabra’s translation elicits certain responses in its receiver at a perlocutionary level, with the result that the intentionality of the source text is not delivered faithfully.  Enani's translation, on the other hand, represents an illocutionary approach that achieves a faithful transference of the source text with its full authorial intention.      

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