A Comparative Study of Interpretation Strategies Applied by Tabriz Professional Simultaneous Interpreters in Dealing with Culture-bound Terms

Abstract

The present study sought to investigate the most prevailing simultaneous interpretation strategies applied to culture-bound items by a number of professional simultaneous interpreters in Tabriz, Iran. To achieve this aim, 50 English and 50 Farsi culture-bound terms and expressions were selected and put in sentences and short paragraphs as the corpus of the study. These sentences were interpreted by seven professional and experienced interpreters of Tabriz. Kalina's and Pedersen's models were applied for eliciting interpretation strategies within Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) as the framework of the study to compare the strategies applied by interpreters. The results were then put into numerical mode in order to explore the most dominant interpretation strategies as well as the least frequent ones. The main aim of the present study was to explore the best and most common strategies applied by professional interpreters while dealing with culture-bound items. The results indicated that the most dominant strategies applied in interpretation of culture-bound items were Total Equivalence and Specification, while the least used strategies were Rephrasing and Substitution. It was witnessed that the interpreters have got a high tendency towards providing the target audience with extra information of the foreign culture in order to transfer the exact nature of the culture-bound items into target language.