Impact of the Gender System on the Translatability of Personification in Literary Texts

Abstract

Personification is a figure of speech in which objects are given human qualities. This rhetorical device, per se, may cause particular difficulties for the translator when rendering a literary text between languages that belong to two remote cultures. The difficulties encountered may arise from a number of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. The present paper deals with the potential effect of the gender system on the translatability of personification .It is to examine the hypothesis that the gender system would significantly affect the translation of personifications within literary texts. The study has found that translators usually take their mother tongue gender system as their perspective to comprehend the ST personification. They are also restricted by the TL gender system to a great extent, impeding them from arriving at TL meaning equivalents of references to the objects in the SL. Therefore, The gender system shapes to a great extent both processes of comprehension and translation of personification in literary texts.