Semantic Adjustments in the Renditions of Short Stories:
Option or Compulsion?
Abstract
While translating, translators may resort to adjustments to preserve the meaning of the source text (ST) intact and to produce natural and comprehensible renditions in the target text (TT). Drawing on Nida and Taber’s (2003) framework, this descriptive study aims to examine the adjustments to meaning in the translations of three short stories, including The Duchess and the Jeweller, The Closed Shop, and The Bet. The results of content analysis of the STs and TTs suggested that most of the semantic adjustments concerned reduction, as opposed to the common assumption on the preponderance of expansion over reduction. Meanwhile, reduction of formula and descriptive substitute served as the most frequently applied reduction and expansion techniques by the translator. Regarding the central principle of producing the closest natural equivalent, the translator’s preferred option of reduction techniques, seems justifiable as it has paved the way to render a dynamic equivalence in the translation.
Keywords:
Semantic Adjustment, Expansion, Reduction, Dynamic equivalenceReferences
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Copyright (c) 2023 Sara Zandian
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Copyright Licensee: Iranian Journal of Translation Studies. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0 license).
