A Comparative Study of Proverbs in the Persian Translation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Translation of proverbs is one of the controversial translation issues. Comprehending and diagnosing proverbs is a problem for many translation practitioners, and finding a translation strategy that would convey the most appropriate meaning to target language readers is inevitably the solution to the problem. This study deals with translating strategies of proverbs in Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe and their equivalents in its Persian translation Hamechiz Forou Mipashad (1391) by Kamrava Ebrahimi. Beekman and Callow’s (1974) model which includes three translating strategies to translate proverbs was chosen as the framework of the study; the words following the proverbs could be introduced as the meaning of the proverb, it might be replaced with an equivalent local proverb, its non-figurative meaning could be stated straightforwardly. To evaluate the strategies used by the translator, a total number of 36 proverbs were extracted from the Things Fall Apart Novel and their Persian equivalents in Hamechiz Forou Mipashad. Based on the data analysis, the researcher came to conclusion that the most frequent strategy used by the translator was the first strategy and the least one was the last strategy. The findings of this research may help translators, students of English language in general, and students of translation training courses in particular, to be more familiar with translation strategies of proverbs.

کلیدواژه ها:

Translation of proverb ، Translation strategies ، Beekman and Callow’s model ، Things Fall Apart Novel ،