Translation and Interpreting Studies 4:1 (2009), 31–46. doi 10.1075/tis.4.1.02lah issn 1932–2798 / e-issn 1876–2700 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Te relevance of the glance of the roe of Wajra A comparative study of the translation of a culture-based metaphor* Raja Lahiani Tis article tests the workability of the principle of relevance at the heart of rel- evance theory by evaluating a corpus of eighteen English and French translations of verse 33 of the Mu‘allaqa of Imru’ al-Qays. Tis verse embodies a conven- tional metaphor refecting a stereotyped image in Arabic poetry, which commu- nicates its ground to the source language (SL) reader by means of inference. Te verse challenges the translator to render the metaphor into an equivalent trope and to refect the ground of the comparison, either by inference or by reference. By comparing the translations in the corpus to the source text (ST) and to each other, this study draws conclusions as to the translatability of a conventional metaphor. Chronology and mode of discourse are taken into account in the evaluation process so as to categorize the translations and the shifs exercised in them. Tis evaluative yardstick is used to measure resemblance and relevance by taking into account both the ST and the target text (TT) contexts. Keywords: relevance theory; translation of metaphor; pre-Islamic poetry; literary translation (Arabic>English; Arabic>French) Introduction Relevance theory “views communication as primarily an inferential process,” by means of which a message receiver infers meaning from a stimulus produced by the communicator (Gutt 1990: 139). Tus, “contextual efects result when infor- mation conveyed by the stimulus is inferentially combined with contextual as- sumptions” (ibid.: 140). Context for Gutt is the only means to avoid ambiguities in “linguistically ambiguous expressions,” to “determine the propositional form of an utterance,” and to abstract the implications of a specifc utterance (1991: 73). It follows that the role of a translator is “to arrive at the intended interpretation of the