A Comparative Study in Relation to the Strategies Used in Translating Irony in Ernest Hemingway`s Short Stories

Translating irony has always been challenging as it relates to each nation culture and language background. So, to fulfill this job, special strategies are needed to guide the translators to find suitable equivalences for the first language ironies to be translated to the second language. In this research strategies for translating verbal and situational ironies in written texts are investigated. To narrow down the job, four short stories by Ernest Hemingway were chosen as the English written texts, namely; The Killers, Hills like White Elephants, Fifty Grand, The Snows of Kilimanjaro. For each story two Persian versions were considered: The Killers translated by Ahmad Golshiri and Reza Gheysariyyeh, Hills like White Elephants translated by Ahmad Golshiri and Araz Barseghian, Fifty Grand translated by Bahman Sholehvar and Sirous Tahbaz and The Snows of Kilimanjaro translated by Mohammadreza Khoubsefat and Shojaeddin Shafa . The model of translation strategies proposed by Mona Baker (1992) is considered as the framework. The result of the total frequency count of the strategies adopted in translating the ironies by the translators show that the most common strategies which are used by these translators to translate English verbal and situational ironies into Persian are using cultural equivalences and using general or neutral equivalences for English words and phrases.

Keywords:

Translation of Irony , equivalence , source text , target text