Towards Evaluating the Translatability of Internet Memes

Due to the rapid growth of the Internet, users from many countries with different languageshave come to interact with each other within cyberspace. The expansion of the Internet hasallowed people to share their ideas on the Internet in the form of memes. Acknowledging thefact that memes from different countries and areas inherit the culture of thoughts of the peoplewithin a certain language, it is worthwhile to study them and the instances where people havetaken the task of translating them to their native language to share them. Memes carry asignificant amount of context and meaning within their language and culture. The translation ofmemes is similar to the translation of idioms due to both being interconnected with culture.While the translation of idioms has been explored many times before, the translation of memesfrom English to Persian has remained almost completely untouched. With this, the study weconducted aimed to explore the possibilities of translating memes by questioning Englishstudents, interviewing Translators, and reviewing a bilingual corpus of original memes andtheir translated versions to get a better understanding of the field of Translated memes. Thedata gathered from the interview and the questionnaire of this study was explored anddiscussed, a statistic table for the results of the questionnaire was made and the strategies usedin the translation of the gathered corpus were tallied. The results of this study indicated thatwhile translators are aware of the fact that memes are not being studied academically, theireffect in teaching about culture and the subgroups it contains is quite immense. Furthermore,this study identified some of the more frequently used strategies of translators, such asparaphrasing to transfer the meaning of memes from English to Persian.

کلیدواژه ها:

Internet ، Memes ، Culture ، Translatability ، Paraphrase ، CSIs ، Social media