Idioms as Daunting Cultural Elements for Translators to Translate: The Case of Collins’s The Hunger Games

Abstract

The present study aimed at investigating the translation strategies the Persian translator adopted for idioms from English into Persian. To do so, qualitative descriptive research, with special attention to idiom translation and to the way such problematic items were translated from English into Persian, was applied. Then, a comparison was made between idioms, which were extracted from Collins’s (2008) The Hunger Games, and their translation made by Akhtar (n.d.) according to Baker’s (1992) taxonomy of translation strategies, namely using an idiom of similar meaning and form, using an idiom of similar meaning but dissimilar form, translation by paraphrase, and translation by omission. Moreover, the chi-square test (X²) was used to see whether there is a significant relationship between the type of translation strategies and the number of them used by the Persian translator. The results revealed that Akhtar employed all four of Baker’s strategies to overcome idioms, of which the last two strategies were the most/least used strategies by him respectively. In addition, he preferred to apply the TT-oriented strategies rather than the ST-oriented ones. Misusing the TT-oriented strategies, in this case translation by paraphrase, did not allow him to create a good sense of some idioms in the TT and communicate effectively with the target audience. Thus, the translations he produced were not mainly acceptable and the target readers did not enjoy them to a great extent. The findings of the current study should be beneficial to translation students, newly researchers, and translation teachers. This study also suggested some pedagogical implications that could be helpful for those who benefit from the results of the study.