Translating Interjections of English Movies to Persian Subtitles

Translating orality aspects from one language into another is a notoriously challenging task which occupies the first place along the cline of translation complexities. This is one of the reasons why rendering interjections as orality aspects have rarely been studied from English into Persian, particularly in the area of subtitled movies. This study, hence, was performed to be one step towards more analyses and researches in this domain. In the present study, the researcher attempted to investigate how interjections are dealt with by Persian translators i. e. whether they omit them or insert them in the target text and finally to identify the best way to render them in Persian subtitles. So, these two translation theories were adopted to analyze the data of the study: hermeneutic motion (Steiner, 1975) and Ullmann’s (1926) transparency. The data were gathered from a popular movie whose selection was the result of a survey among one hundred viewers who were not familiar with English as the spoken language of the films. After a thorough analysis, it was concluded that the present model as a combination of the above-mentioned theories is if not the best at least the most applicable way for translating interjections, providing a substitution in the target language which approximates the source language concept as close as possible and it was also efficient in this research.

Keywords:

Movie Subtitles , Orality , Interjections , Hermeneutic Motion and Transparency