Conflict Resolution Strategies in the Iran-Iraq War Books

Abstract

Iran is located in the Western Asia, an area with a long history of violent, bloody conflicts. Iranian translators who work in this context are frequently asked to cope with highly-charged texts which narrate and comment on its current and past conflicts. This study was aimed to examine and classify their strategies of conflict resolution in dealing with such texts in Iran. The focus was on detecting the most and least frequent strategies. Salama-Carr’s (2007), and Webne-Behrman’s (1998) definition of conflict were adopted, and Thomas-Kilmann’s (1974) typology of conflict resolution strategies were used as theoretical framework. The corpus included five books of the Iran-Iraq War along with their Persian translations. The books were published by Marz-o-Boom Publications with the aim of broadening readers’ view, and providing them with Iraqi or Western (Other) perspective on the war. A descriptive statistical analysis of the corpus was carried out. The results revealed that all Thomas-Kilmann’s (1974) resolution strategies, i.e. accommodating, avoiding, competing, compromising, and collaborating were used in the corpus. Compromising and accommodating were the most and least frequent strategy, with the percentages of 54.4 % and 1.3%, respectively. The findings suggest that, in a conflict situation, collaborating and compromising are two frequent and useful strategies in the translation context that could provide the readers with Other’s perspective but direct their reading at the same time. Accommodating and avoiding are rarely used in such a situation as the first means yielding to Other’s view point, and the latter does not address the conflict. Competing is used in dealing with sensitive national and ideological issues.