A Qualitative and Quantitative Inquiry into the Translation of English Fiction Titles into Persian
Abstract
This paper sets out to study the translation procedures adopted by Iranian translators in rendering the titles of English fictions. The corpus comprised 300 titles of English translated fictions selected based on convenient sampling that was paralleled with their Persian counterparts. The books were published within the last three decades, and were authored by a wide range of English writers and have been translated by many Iranian translators. To obtain detailed and dependable results, the corpus was analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The findings revealed that literal translation was the most frequent procedure followed by translators. Recreation, employment of related words, transliteration, reduction, adaptation, and addition were found as other translation procedures in the order of distribution. The frequency of recreation as the second procedure was the interesting result of the present study, in which translators opted for a completely new title irrelevant to the original title. Elaborating on the target text titles and the themes of their fictions in various procedures showed that almost all the changes applied to the original titles were consistent with the events of the stories or their final destiny.
Keywords:
Titles, ProcedureReferences
Abrams, M. H., & Harpham, G. (2011). A glossary of literary terms. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning.
Adams, H. (1987). Titles, titling, and entitlement. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46, 7–21.
Briffa, C., and Rose M. C. (2009). Stylistic Creativity when Translating Titles [paper presentation]. PALA 2009 Conference, Roosevelt Academy in Middleburg, the Netherlands. Retrieved from www.pala.ac.uk/resources/proceedings/2009/briffa2009.pdf
Brontë, E. (1992). Wuthering heights (K. Parvaneh, Trans.). London: Thomas Cautley Newby. (Original book published 1947).
Catford, J. C. (1965). A linguistic theory of translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Christie, A. (1993). The big four (A. Sharifian, Trans.). London: William Collins & Sons. (Original book published 1927).
Christie, A. (2006). The moving finger (B. Montazeri, Trans.). New York: Dodd Mead & company. (Original book published 1976).
Clancy, T., & Greenburg, M. (2000). Ruthless.com (M. Ghasa, Trans.). New York: Berkley Publishing Group. (Original book published in 1947).
Conan Doyle, A. (2005). The crown of diamond (M. Pars, Trans.). New York: Bakerrette Press. (Original book published 1958).
Conan Doyle, A. (2015). A study in Scarlet (H. Angali, Trans.). London: Wardlock. (Original book published 1993).
Cromer, B. (2003). The TV kid (P. Alipour, Trans.). London: Puffin Books. (Original book published 1993).
Dickins, J., Hervey, S. & Higgins, I. (2002). Thinking Arabic translation. A course in translation method—Arabic to English. London &New York: Routledge.
Farghal, M. & Bazzi, H. (2017). Translation of English fiction titles into Arabic. Translation & Interpreting, 9(2), 114–137.
Genette, G. (1988). Structure and functions of the title in literature. (B. Crampe, Trans.) Critical Inquiry, 14 (4), 692–720. The University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343668.
Hosseini, H. (2013). A CDA approach to translating titles from English into Persian. Unpublished MA thesis. Allameh Tabataba'i University.
Kitchin, R. (2014). Big Data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts. Big Data & Society, 1(1), 1–12.
Lodge, D. (2011). The Art of fiction. London: Vintage, Print.
Majcher A. E. (2017). Proper names: Translation analysis on the example of “Prince Caspian”, Respectus Philologicus, 31(36), pp. 134–147.
Malamud, B. (1991). The fixer (N. Alipour, Trans.). New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (Original book published 1966).
Martí, R. & Zapter, M. (1993). Translation of titles of films: A critical approach. Sintagma, 5, 81–87.
Munday, J. (2008). Introducing translation studies: Theories and applications. New York: Routledge.
Newmark, P. (1988). A textbook of translation. New York & London: Prentice Hall.
Nida, E., & Taber, C. R. (2003). The theory and practice of translation. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publication.
Nida, E. A. (1964). Toward a science of translating. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Paul, G. (2009). Translation in practice: A symposium. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press.
Salehi, M. & Fumani, M. R. (2013). The Study of Novel Title Translation from English into Persian Based on the Functionalist Skopos Theory. Linguistics and Literature Studies 1(4): 197–205.
Steel, S. (1997). The vanished (B. Nezamabadi, Trans.). New York: Dell. (Original book published 1993).
Taha, I. (2009). Semiotics of literary titling: Three categories of reference. Applied Semiotics 22, 43–62. Retrieved from http://french.chass.utoronto.ca/as-sa/ASSANo22/Article4en.html
Viezzi, M. (2013). Titles and translation [paper presentation]. VAKKI-symposium XXXIII 7 (2013) VAKKI Publications 2. Vaasa, 374–384. Retrieved from http://www.vakki.net/publications/2013/VAKKI2013_Viezzi.pdf
Vilione, M. (2011). Translating titles of novels: Why and how we (don't) translate them [paper presentation]. Translation Conference, Unika Atmajaya. Retrieved July 2013 from http://www.academia.edu/1102624/Translating_Titles_of_Novels
Zaymus, I. (2020). Literary title translations from English to Hungarian. Freeside Europe online academic journal. 1(10): 1–6.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
DOR
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).
