Translation of Negative Politeness Strategies from English into Persian: The Case of Novel Translation

Abstract

Since the 1970s the phenomenon of politeness theory has come to the fore as one of the areas of applied linguistics. This notion has recently played a pivotal role in the realm of translation studies as well. However, the number of research projects in this area of translation studies, especially in English and Persian, is very small. This scantiness was among the rationales behind conducting the present study. This study aimed at investigating the translation strategies used by Persian translators in translating negative politeness strategies as well as translation quality assessment (TQA) of these pragmatic structures. To this end, two research questions regarding the translation strategies as well as TQA were defined, and the novel ‘Grapes of Wrath’ was selected as the material of the study. Using Brown & Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, the novel was analyzed and a bulk of 100 utterances encompassing negative politeness strategies was randomly selected and juxtaposed with their Persian translations. Then, they were analyzed based on Newmark’s (1988) translation strategy as well as Rahimi’s (2004) translation theory and Zamani’s (2013) TQA framework. The results of the data analysis indicated that from among Newmark’s 16 translation strategies, 6 strategies proved to be more beneficial to translate negative politeness strategies. Moreover, the findings of the study proved that the level of Persian translation quality was at an average level, implying the fact that even professional translators require a higher mastery of pragmatic aspects of language– politeness theory in this respect.