Abstract:
The present study aimed firstly at investigating the impact of translators' style on figurative language translation from English into Persian. Secondly, it intended to find which strategies were most frequently adopted by Persian translators to translate figures of speech into Persian. Lastly, the study sought to check the extent of transference of figurative features of literary texts in English-Persian renderings. To achieve these purposes, the English novel, Little Women by Alcott (1880) and its three Persian translations by Raiszadeh (1997), Akhavan (1996), and Morvarid (2000) were used as the materials of the study. The original novel, along with its three selected translations, were first studied carefully by the researchers and about fifty percent of the novel was chosen to be analyzed in terms of figures of speech, which are part of stylistic features of any literary text. Then, the figures of speech in the stated sample, besides the Persian equivalents of each of them used by the three translators, were identified. Finally, a hybrid model incorporating 5 strategies retrieved from Newmrak's (1988) and Baker's (1992) models of translating figurative language was utilized to examine the identified tropes and determine the type and number of strategies employed by any individual translator. The obtained results revealed that figurative language devices were translated from the source into the target language through a variety of strategies, which can be indicative of the translator’s stylistic tendencies.
Machine summary:
The rationale behind choosing Little Women and its Persian renderings for the present research was that this novel possesses a good number of different literary devices which are part of stylistic features of any language and are appeared in part in the mentioned Persian translations, paving the way for a comparative analysis in connection with the posed research questions.
(page 18, paragraph5) ما امشب در "دره نومیدی و دل شکستگی" بودیم و مادر آمد و مثل داستان کتاب، ما را از آن بیرون کشید، ما چطوری باید این بازی انجام دهیم؟( رئیس زاده) MA emšæb dær "Dære no:midi væ del šekæstegi" boudim væ mAdær Amæd væ mesle dAstAne ketAb, mArA æz An biroun kešid,mA četori bAyæd in bAzi-0- ænjAm dæhim?(Rais zAde) Type of strategy used by the translator: Similar, No. 2 ما امشب درباتالق ناامیدی بودیم که مادر آمد و نقش نجات دهنده را در نمایش اجرا کرد و ما را بیرون آورد.
This is also graphically represented in Figure 4 below: (رجوع شود به تصویر صفحه) As it could be seen, Raiszadeh and Akhavan were considerably different from Morvarid in terms of the frequency of use of identical, similar, and zero translation strategies.
Due to the above-mentioned issues, this study aimed at determining to what extent the three translators (Raiszadeh, 1997; Akhavan, 1996; and Morvarid, 2000) stylistically differ in terms of translating figurative language in their Persian renderings of Alcott’s Little Women.