Implicature

Implicatures are the implied meanings that people communicate to their listeners. They may differ from one culture to another, making translations more challenging. The purpose of this study was to examine how implicatures were treated in the English translations of Persian texts and the extent of pragmatic equivalence. To this end, implicatures in four Persian children's stories written by Hooshang Morādi Kermāni were identified and compared to their English translations, translated by Caroline Croskery. The Gricean Cooperation Principle served as the theoretical framework of the study, and four maxims of quality, quantity, relation, and manner were used to analyze implicatures. Chesterman’s strategies of pragmatic equivalence were also used to determine the strategies used in translation. According to the results, the translator was largely successful in achieving pragmatic equivalence. Additionally, literal translation, explicitness, equivalence strategy, and illocutionary change were found to be used more commonly than the other pragmatic strategies. The findings of this study could have benefits for translators to deal with pragmatic issues and for syllabus designers to create more practical content.

The present study aimed to examine kinetic units, implicature, and coherence in Persian audio descriptions. To this end, 10 Persian audio-described movies, totaling 1,004 minutes, were analyzed, and their audio descriptions (ADs) were documented, resulting in 3,485 records. These records were filtered for descriptions related to characters’ movements, yielding 2,095 ADs, which were analyzed in three phases. First, the type of kinetic unit in each AD was identified. Second, the implicature of kinetic units was examined to determine whether it was included in the ADs or ignored. The final phase addressed coherence in ADs. The results revealed that gesture was the most frequent kinetic unit in Persian ADs, followed by manner and posture. Moreover, 96% of kinetic units lacked implicature, and only 2.5% of implicatures related to characters’ movements were ignored in audio descriptions, which does not raise serious concerns about accessibility for blind and visually impaired audiences. Regarding coherence, 97% of Persian ADs were found to be coherent, highlighting the substantial accessibility they provide to their target audience. However, accessibility was not solely contingent upon linguistic and pragmatic factors. Technical challenges, such as background music overshadowing ADs, posed additional barriers to media accessibility.

Various articles have addressed the field of audiovisual translation and its related issues, but the pragmatic aspects of this area have not been addressed as they should be. As pragmatic issues are mainly covert in dialogues, and films are dialogue-oriented, it is crucial to consider these aspects in this area. Implicature is one of these hidden aspects of meaning which challenges the translators’ knowledge and competency. Sometimes ignoring this pragmatic aspect results in misinterpreting the intended meaning of the original version, whether it is a text or a film. Therefore, the present study intends to examine the translation of implicatures and their intricacies in Persian dubbing. To this end, four American films (Notting hill, The bucket list, The ultimate gift and Still Alice) were selected, all of which had been dubbed into Persian. All parts of these films were analyzed to determine whether there is any mismatch between original and dubbed versions in terms of this pragmatic aspect. The translation techniques and their frequency of occurrences which were applied to translate this pragmatic aspect are illustrated too. The results indicate that there are mismatches between the original and dubbed versions in terms of implicature, and the most frequent number of mismatches refers to scalar implicatures. Conventional and conversational implicatures follow it respectively. Moreover, deletion is the most frequent translation strategy which was applied to render this pragmatic aspect.