• Shideh Yaghoubi

  Author

• Reza Kafipour

  Author

This study was conducted to compare two Persian translations of metaphorical phrasal verbs in
the novel of ‘1984’ by George Orwel in order to find out significant differences between two
translators in applying Newmark’s translation strategies. Translation of metaphors is one of the
most problematic issues in translation studies. Metaphors are of many types. This paper aims at
examining one type of metaphors which seems to have been left unexplored. These metaphors
are called phrasal verbs. However, by considering the creativity of the language, introducing a
framework for the translation of metaphorical phrasal verbs and also making them up to date is
necessary. So, the researcher compared 497 cases of phrasal verbs found in the original text,
English novel ‘1984’ by George Orwel, with its two Persian translations by Balooch and
Hosseini. In this investigation, context plays a very important role because in most cases,
translation devoid of context cannot be justified. Having examined the strategies applied by
translators in translation of phrasal verbs into Persian, the researcher found out that out of
seven strategies proposed by Newmark (1988), ‘translation of a metaphor by the same metaphor
combined with sense’, ‘conversion of a metaphor to sense’, and ‘translation of a metaphor by a
simile plus sense’ were not employed in practice and the next four strategies that were used by
translators consist of ‘reproducing the same image in the target language’ that is the most
frequently used strategy, ‘replacing the image in the source language with a standard target
language image’ as the second and ‘deletion’ as the least frequently used strategy. Chi-square
test and computing the frequencies of phrasal verbs showed that Hosseini applied the first
strategy ‘reproducing the same image in the target language’ more appropriately and more
frequently than Balooch. However, they applied other two strategies more or less the same.
Moreover, the study showed that it cannot be claimed that one translator translated better than
the other one in terms of their strategy use. It implies that the appropriate and frequent use of
translation strategies cannot lead to a good translation by itself. Therefore, the translators
should consider other significant factor in the process of translation.

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