Translation of Proverbs in Classical-Persian Literature: Enhancing Beekman and Callow’s Model via Sokhan Dictionary of Proverbs

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

Abstract

Translating proverbs is sometimes a challenging task. The present paper aims at investigating the most productive strategies of rendering Persian proverbs into English. Therefore, as the first step, a compilation of classical Persian proverbs were selected from Anvari’s (2004) Sokhan Dictionary of Proverbs and their literal-semantic translations were provided. The proverbs’ counterparts in English were also extracted from monolingual dictionaries including The concise Oxford dictionary of proverbs and A dictionary of American proverbs. A mixed procedure was recognized to be more fruitful than the isolated use of each procedure proposed by Beekman and Callow (1974). Replacing the source-text proverb with its equivalent target-language proverb and referring to its literal translation and meaning in a footnote can be a highly productive procedure. This procedure would provide the target-language readership with enough information and never hinders the fluency of reading the source-text. The results also confirmed the undeniable importance of context while rendering proverbs and, finally, the new procedure called “substitution” was proposed by the researcher.

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