Employing Compensation Strategy in Translation of Idioms: A Case Study of the Translation of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Persian

Abstract

How can translators compensate the loss of idiomaticity while translating idiomatic texts?  Taking an English novel as the source text and its Persian translations as the target language, we aim to answer this question. For the sake of this study 61 idioms and 32 non-idioms were extracted from the first chapter of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In the next stage, we compared the whole data with their Persian translations by Daryabandari and Golestan. The results show that in most cases the translators had translated the SL idioms into TL non-idioms. This strategy leads to an idiomatic imbalance between the ST and TT. In order to somehow deal with this idiomatic loss in their translations, the Persian translators followed compensation strategy by adding target language idioms elsewhere in the text. This means that, if in any case an SL idiom could not be translated as an idiom in TL , the translator can make up for the lost idiom by adding a TL idiom to places where there originally was a non-idiom.