Implicatures in the Persian and Turkish Translations of Four American Short Stories

Abstract

Translation of implicature as a challenging issue in Translation Studies is addressed in the present study. Considering this notion, the researchers’ main concern after extracting implicatures was to investigate the translation procedures proposed by Molina and Hurtado Albir (2002) and also Newmark (1988) in translating implicatures including: 1. Linguistic amplification, 2. Linguistic compression, 3. Literal translation, 4. Transposition, 5. Established equivalence, and 6. Free translation. To achieve the aims of the study, six questions were proposed to examine the translation procedures adopted by the translators and to find out the most frequent translation procedures utilized in rendering the relevant implicatures. To this end, four short stories entitled “Cat in the Rain”, “Indian Camp”, “Killers”, and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” by American writer Ernest Hemingway and their two best-seller Persian and Turkish translations by Ahmad Golshiri and Shirmohammad Qudratoghlu were chosen to be analyzed. Through a contrastive analysis in this qualitative descriptive study, sixty-nine implicatures were identified and extracted from all these short stories according to the maxims defined by Grice (1975) and compared with their corresponding translations. The results indicated that the Turkish translator has used linguistic amplification and free translation that do not lead to reproduce the implicatures in the target text; therefore, the Persian translator was more successful in recreating the implicatures in the target text (see Abbasi, 2016).