translation strategies

The main priority for university translation educators is to improve the quality and outcomes of translation courses. To achieve such a goal, the instructors are required to integrate learners' needs, identified with the help of a needs survey, into syllabus content. Accordingly, the present study was conducted to identify the Iranian English majors' difficulties in translating English texts since once a problem is identified, exploring the best pedagogical solutions would follow. The aim was accomplished through qualitative descriptive research conducted at Islamic Azad University, Shiraz Branch tracing the errors committed by the English majors in their exam papers in academic years 2016-2019. Following the model proposed by Miremadi (2008), the syntactic and lexical problems were identified in the exam papers collected during six semesters. Moreover, three more categories were added to the list as the data analysis moved forward: culture problems, stylistic problems, and miscellaneous errors with detailed subdivisions. What appeared to be worthy of attention in the results was the students' weakness in text and sentence segmentation to find the function of the components to approach textual meaning, resulting from the students' poor English language proficiency. The results also revealed the students' poor topical knowledge as well as the lack of knowledge of translation techniques and strategies.

Languages are widening every day and new words and structures are born when they are needed. The objective of this study is to survey the strategies that are used in the translation of neologisms in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and to see if there is a significant difference between the strategies used by Persian translators in the novel Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and to find the most and the least strategies adopted by the Persian translators. To address the objectives of the present study, the researcher selected two Persian translations of the novel. To identify the neologisms used in the texts, the source text along with its translations was cross-analyzed sentence-by-sentence. Afterwards, on the basis of Newmark's definitions and classifications of neologisms, the neologisms were identified. The strategies which were used in the translation of various types of neologisms were also investigated. Data analysis involved quantitative analysis. It was concluded that the most frequent strategy used by translator Vida Eslamieh was through-translation and the least frequent strategy was modulation. In Shahnaz Majidi's translation, the most frequent strategy was through-translation. The least frequent strategies were modulation and descriptive terms. According to the results of the chi-square test, there was no significant difference among the strategies used by two Persian translators in translation of neologisms. The results of this study can be useful for translators and students to become aware of the strategies used in English to Persian translations of the neologisms.

This study focused mainly on the shifts of the grammatical cohesion in texts translated from English into Persian. It aimed to identify the grammatical cohesive devices (GCDs) in ST and TT separately, based on Halliday and Hassn's Model (1976), determine the number of occurrences of GCDs in two texts and finally, illustrate types of shifts of grammatical cohesion and strategies used in TT. To achieve these aims, a mixed-method (comparative and descriptive model) research design was used to spot cohesive shifts in TT due to translation, together with the employed strategies. To this purpose, the book, Oral Reproduction of Stories was investigated, with its translation. 39 different stories by different writers were selected as the sample of analysis. The results showed that the TT adopted all the three types of GCDs except verbal and casual substitution, with verbal substitution in Persian being carried down by reference, ellipsis and lexical cohesion. The occurrence of GCDs in the TT was more frequent than that of ST. Regarding the general analysis of the cohesion shifts, the study showed that three types of shifts (i.e. establishment of new cohesion, elimination of cohesion and change of type of cohesive features) occur in translation. Finally it was revealed that the translation strategies undertaken by the various translators are motivated and influenced by three factors (i. e. systemic language differences Baker (1992), stylistic preferences and the translation process itself (Blum- Kulka, 1986).

The focus of current research is the translation of psychology book titles. There are numerous studies in the field of titles translation, but they are restricted in Persian context. The aim of this study is thus to investigate the translation strategies used by Persian translators when transferring English psychology book titles into Persian. To achieve this objective, 245 titles of translated psychology books published from 2007 to 2013 in the field of personal success were first gathered from Isfahan Municipality Library, some local bookstores and online sources. Then, the types of original titles and their translations were examined based on Genette (1989) categorization. The findings thereof revealed that most of the titles had the form, title plus subtitle in both languages in terms of structure. The forms of the titles were also analyzed, and it was discovered that nominal titles were the most frequent ones in the source text and translators preferred not to change the original structure. Next, the corpus was analyzed based on Vinay and Darbelnet’ (1995) model and the findings showed that the modulation was the most frequently-used translation strategy. It was also revealed that the translators were inclined to change the semantics and point of view of the source language. The second most frequently-used strategy was literal translation, showing the popularity of direct translation strategies. Finally, the functions of titles were analyzed based on Nord’s (1995) model. Since functions are highly subjective and cannot be tabulated, they were discussed one by one in the discussion section of the study. The findings of this study can boost the theories of title translation and provide the functional issues of translation studies with new insights.

This study sought to investigate translation strategies in translation of culture-specific items (CSIs) in Persian translation of ‘The Egyptian’ novel by Mika Waltari. To this end, it benefited from corpus-based comparative content analysis design within a qualitative approach. The corpus of this study consisted of 150 pages of the novel ‘The Egyptian’ by Mika Waltari along with their Persian translations by Zabihollah Mansouri, which were selected through simple random sampling. Data analysis included parallel comparison of the source text and its translation in terms of the occurrence of different types of translation strategies used in the translations. Furthermore, statistical procedures which were conducted consisted of calculation of frequency and percentage of different translation strategies (to identify the most and least frequent strategies) and chi-square test (to see if there is a significant difference between the frequencies of different strategies used by the translator). The results of data analysis showed that the translator has used the following translation strategies: Calque, equivalence, adaptation, literal translation, modulation and omission. Moreover, it was found that the most frequent strategy was calque. Furthermore, the lowest frequency belonged to modulation and omission. In addition, a significant difference was revealed between the frequencies of different translation strategies. The findings have some implications for translation students, translation teachers, and translators.

Translation Studies (TS) moved away from the focus on literary translation and linguistic approaches to new types of translation called Audiovisual translation (AVT). Technological advancements affected the development of AVT. Technology created a situation in the world of moving pictures within which subtitling and dubbing take an important role in optimizing communication. Despite the growing interest in AVT, song subtitling and dubbing remain on the periphery of TS. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the differences that may exist between the strategies used for subtitling and dubbing the songs on some special musical animations from English into Persian based on Schioldager et al.’s (2008) twelve micro-strategies. The corpus of this study consisted of three musical animations which are Strange Magic, Moana , and Frozen 2 . This study focused on nine songs in each animation. The songs had meaningful lyrics, established the character(s), aided in the narrative, and made the audience relate to the character or the story. Hence, in the selected animations 27 songs were selected. The data were analyzed using a chi-squared test. The results indicated a statistically significant difference between six out of 12 strategies for dubbing and subtitling the animation’s songs. The differences were related to “Direct Translation”, “Oblique translation”, “Adaption”, “Addition”, “Substitution”, and “Deletion”. The results revealed the most frequent micro strategies used by Iranian translators in dubbing songs were “Oblique Translation”, “Deletion”, “Substitution”, and “Adaptation”. However, “Direct Translation” and “Addition” were the most used strategies in subtitling songs in animations. Thus, it was revealed that the translator in dubbing not only transferred the dialogue from the source text but also considered the source text idea. The findings offered a pedagogical implication for translation students, subtitlers, and dubbers to recognize better the subtitling and dubbing strategies that were being used by translators in the Iranian context.

Subtitling, like all other types of audiovisual translation, has always been influenced by cultural factors, and in turn, subtitles have influenced their target readers. The relation between culture and language in interlingual subtitling might cause some problems in translating Culture References (CRs). The aim of the present study was to classify the samples of CRs in the “Harry Potter” movie series based on Klingberg’s (1986) model. It was also intended to investigate the strategies applied by Iranian translators in subtitling the (CRs) in “Harry Potter” movies from English into Persian based on Diaz Cintas's (2007) proposed strategies. To do so, instances of CRs were drawn from the two series of Harry Potter entitled Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire (2005). The data analysis was carried out by descriptive statistics to indicate the frequency and percentages. The findings revealed that “Personal Names” and “Magical Objects”, were the most frequently used CRs in the two selected series of Harry Potter movies based on Klingberg’s (1986) model. Additionally, the results showed that “Loan” and “Calque” were the most frequently used strategies in subtitling the CRs. The findings of the present study may be useful for English translation students, subtitlers, and fansubbers who do subtitle English movies in the Iranian context

Audiovisual translation is the term that has been utilized to mention mainly the transfer from one language to another language of the verbal elements that existed in audiovisual products. Among various modes of AVT, dubbing is the most common. Generally, in AVT there are problems in the field of idioms translation because idioms are considered one of the most problematical and complicated aspects of language. Moreover, since the meaning of idioms is not recognized by their words, translating them is hard task for translators. For solving this problematic issue, translators use different strategies. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate and analyze the translation of idioms in dubbing. This research investigated the translation of English idioms in Persian dubbing of two comedy films named, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “21 Jump Street” according to Baker's (1992) strategies. To analyze the data, the frequency and percentage distribution were calculated for each Baker's strategy, which had been applied in the translation of English idioms into Persian dubbing of mentioned movies. Results showed that translation by paraphrase was the most frequent applied strategy, and using an idiom of similar meaning and form was the least frequent applied strategy in Persian dubbing of two mentioned comedy movies. The results of this study could be helpful for translators to recognize the frequent strategies of idiom translation used in dubbing and university teachers can train them for their students.

Linguistic and semantic differences are some of the main problems of translating the Holy Qur’an into English. The present study highlights the problem of lexical gap and examines a number of terms- totally 117 in 110 verses- of the Holy Qur’an, including the referential meaning of ‘sin’ and their English translations. The researcher aimed to find the strategies applied by three translators and three machine translation systems (MSTs) and to compare them.  In this regard, five frequent and common terms – ‘اثم’, ‘جناح’, ‘سیئه’, ‘ذنب’, and ‘وزر’-were selected. The strategies proposed by Mollanazar (2009) were employed to fill the gap.  To do so, the English translations produced by three machine translation systems (MTSs), namely Google Translate, SDL Free Translation and Systranet were compared with three human translation by M.H. Shakir, A.Qaraei and T.B.Irving. The results revealed that in most verses, almost in six English translations, a generic term was used without any additional information to make the sense clearer. There was no noticeable difference between human and machine translations in applying the proposed strategies to fill the gap and make the English version more meaningful in terms of these apparently similar but contextually different terms. Thus, it seems that these differences were not focused on, while rendering these given verses to English. 

Metaphor has usually been presented as a literary device which has some rhetorical and aesthetic purposes. However, in economic discourse, metaphor has a communicative function exhibited in English business texts. This study is directed towards a comprehensive analysis of metaphor translation in English business texts into Arabic. By selecting a sample of metaphors from business articles on BBC, CNN and Project Syndicate online websites, the study analyzes the data in terms of function, significance and role each metaphor plays in its context. The study also applies the cognitive approach to metaphor in the analysis of data and shows the important role this approach has on translation studies. The cognitive theory of metaphor provides significant insights into translation studies and now metaphor translatability is no longer a question of the individual metaphorical expression, as identified in the ST, but it has become linked to the level of conceptual systems in source and target cultures. Four main strategies of translating game/sport business metaphors are detected and used in the illustrative examples throughout the article. The study reveals that translators may opt for either preserving the metaphorical image of the source language metaphor or explicating its informative value; literal translation of some business metaphorical concepts presents itself as a workable solution in many cases because of the shared mood of cognition between English and Arabic language readers.

Allusions in literary texts are among the elements which can cause intercultural misunderstanding. In this study, the translation of the  allusions of two narrative poems selected from Nizami’s The seven Images (Haft Gonbad) were studied. To this end, the frequent types of implicit allusions were extracted from the poems: The Black Dome and The White Dome . Next, the original text was compared with its English translations to identify whether these allusive meanings were found and transferred in their translations. To achieve this goal, Leppihalm’s (1997) model of translation strategies for key-phrase (KP) allusions was employed. The findings indicated that the most frequent strategy selected by the translators is literal translation. Rendering the poems into English literally, the translators ignored the implicit meanings underlying the allusions. The findings can have implications for translating literary texts.

- This study aimed at investigating the translation of address terms from Arabic text of the Quran (ST) into English as well as Persian translations (TTs) based on politeness principle. The purpose was to evaluate the two translations in terms of implementing proper polite address terms. The data were gathered from the Original Arabic version of the Quran as the ST and two different versions of its English translations (Gharib and Yusuf Ali) as well as two versions of Persian translations (Fooladvand and Makarem Shirazi) as the TTs.  In order to analyze the data, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory of politeness was used. The most frequent translation strategies were also identified according to Vinay and Darbelnet (2012) as well as Harvey and Higgins (1986) for rendering proper nouns. Moreover, the classification of address terms by Aliakbari&Tohi (2008) and address functions by Biber et al (1999) was also applied. To achieve the objectives, the following steps were taken: address terms were extracted from Arabic, English and Persian texts of the Quran. Then, they were classified to different types, after that politeness principles used in the Arabic text of the Quran and their rendering were compared and contrasted, and finally translation strategies applied to render Arabic address terms into English and Persian were identified. The results of the study revealed that all versions of English and Persian translations depicted the psychological distance between Allah and people as the Arabic version of the Quran. Also, the findings showed that in the translation of address terms from SL into TTs translators did their best to maintain the words of Allah by rendering the words literally.

The present study centered around the problem of functional equivalence in source-text-target-text pairs. In fact, this study was an attempt to investigate patterns of professional translators’ main approaches to the production of functionally equivalent Qur’ānic translations. The ultimate objective was to investigate the practicality of Reiss’s theoretical functionalist text-oriented model of translation. Hence, five selected English translations were descriptively and linguistically analyzed and compared with their corresponding Qur’ānic surahs. The analysis included content-specific and formal features of the texts to discover common and frequent translation strategies applied in the production of each target text. The descriptive findings were then calculated using frequency and percentage. The findings on the translations of the informative and expressive texts revealed that Reiss’s relevant prediction was right. However, in contrast to Reiss’s view, the operative text was mostly translated literally rather than adaptively by most of the translators.

The translation of cultural items from the Qur’ān and Islam can be challenging. This study investigated the strategies used by male and female translators to translate Qur’ānic cultural items, as well as the consistency of these strategies. The researchers first identified Qur’ānic cultural items from the preface to Ali Quli Qara'i's English translation of the Qur’ān. They then searched the Qur’ān for these items and extracted the verses that contained them. The researchers found that the most common strategy used to translate Qur’ānic cultural items was to replace them with a more general word. The second most common strategy was to paraphrase the item using a related word. None of the translators used the strategies of cultural substitution or illustration. The researchers also found that the three translators used similar strategies that were similar to other. Ali Quli Qara'i was the most consistent translator, using a single strategy in 82% of the cases. Tahereh Saffarzadeh was the second most consistent translator, using a single strategy in 80% of the cases. Muhammad Ahmed and Samira Ahmed were the least consistent translators, using a single strategy in 62% of the cases. The findings of this study suggest that there are a limited number of effective strategies for translating Qur’ānic cultural items. Translators are advised to be aware of these strategies and could use them consistently in order to produce accurate and faithful translations.

Notwithstanding the growing number of research on many aspects of audiovisual translation, cross-cultural pragmatics has remained under-investigated in audiovisual translation. The purpose of this paper is to examine the translation of general extenders—such as and stuff (like that) and or something in Persian dubbing and non-professional subtitling. Positioned at the crossroads of the pragmatics of fiction and audiovisual translation, the analysis presented in this article draws upon past research on English and Persian general extenders, as well as the models for translating general extenders. In doing so, this study follows a corpus-based approach, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches to identify translation patterns of general extenders by dubbing translators and fansubbers in Iran. A corpus of twelve English films from different genres, along with their Persian dubbing and non-professional subtitling, was compiled for the investigation. Overall findings suggest that non-professional subtitlers followed a literal and sourced-oriented approach to translation, resulting in a more direct translation of general extenders. In contrast, the dubbing team (i.e., translator and dubbing director) tended to edit out these pragmatic issues in their translations; therefore, many general extenders were deleted in the translation. This was partly because the translation for dubbing has to be synchronized, resulting in some omissions and partly because the dubbing team paid less attention to these elements. Additionally, other strategies, such as substitution or explicitation were infrequently used in both dubbing and non-professional subtitling. The paper concludes by discussing limitations and offering opportunities for future research.

The translation of proper nouns, such as Allah’s attributes of acts, has consistently been a contentious issue in the translation of Qur’ānic exegesis. This research aimed to investigate the frequency and types of strategies employed in the English translations of Allah’s attributes of acts in the Holy Qur’ān. The study sought to explore the strategies used by translators in the translation of Qur’ānic exegesis and to determine if significant differences existed among the translators in the application of the strategies proposed by Chesterman (1997). The corpus comprised six English translations of the Holy Qur’ān by Asad, Pickthall, Saheeh, Arberry, Khan and Hilali, and Mubarakpuri. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were utilized to analyze the data, based on a revised version of Chesterman’s (1997) model. The descriptive data revealed that only six out of ten strategies were used in translating Allah’s attributes of acts. Only two strategies, transposition and emphasis change, were not used significantly differently, while the other four strategies, synonymy, paraphrase, transliteration, and expansion, were employed significantly differently. The inferential statistics revealed significant differences in the application of each strategy by each translator. However, no significant differences were found among the translators in the application of the same strategy when rendering Allah’s attributes of acts.

Translating taboo words is one of the challenging tasks that translators face during subtitling and dubbing movies. The translation of taboo words should be handled carefully since they may violate the norms of the target society. In this regard, the translators use different strategies to find an equivalent in the target language. This study tried to identify the strategies used by Iranian translators in dubbing and subtitling the F*k words as taboos in American English-drama crime television series based on Davoodi’s (2009) model. Thus, this was a corpus-based study that has a quantitative method with a descriptive comparative approach. The corpus of this study was limited to F*k words found in the TV series called Big Little Lies season one. This TV series was selected as the corpus of this research because this series movie was incredibly more suggestive and popular in recent decades and targeted a wide range of audiences and adults. Thus, 80 F*k words were identified for further analysis based on Sharifi and Darchinian's (2009) model. Descriptive statistics were used to determine frequencies and percentages of the applied strategies in the Persian subtitled and dubbed of the F*k words. The findings showed that Substitution, and Euphemism were the first and second used strategies by Iranian translators for dubbing and subtitling the F*k words, respectively. Additionally, the results of the Chi-square test revealed that there was not a significant difference between Iranian translators’ strategies for subtitling and dubbing F*k words. The results of the present study can be beneficial for Iranian subtitlers, dubbers, and translation students in the subtitling and dubbing of F*k words as taboos in crime drama movies from English into Persian.