The Representation of Loanwords in Literary Translation: The Persian Translation of Funny in Farsi

Authors
Badri Sadat Seyed Jalali 1
Azita Abbassi 2
1 Linguistic Department/University of Alzahra
2 Linguistic Department, University of Alzahra
Abstract
One of the very consequences of language contacts is the presence of loanwords in a language. A great number of linguistic researches have focused on loanword studies through sociolinguistic approaches. In case of literary texts, the frequent and conscious use of loanwords reflects the style and the implicated purposes of the author which must definitely be transferred in translation. The present study aims to investigate the role of loanwords in literary texts, and their representations in translations. To this end, 148 loanwords were extracted from the American novel, Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas, then their representations in the Persian translation were studied considering three variables: the donor language, the semantic fields of loanwords and the translation strategies. The results revealed that ‘equivalence’ and ‘definition’ were the priorities of the translator among the translation strategies, and this has led to lose some cultural aspects of the literary text in translation.

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