Politeness in Adaptation of Persian Multimodal Texts: The Case of “Half Life2”Videogame

Abstract

Audiovisual translation is a different form of translation in that visual aspects of an image need to be taken into consideration. The aims of the current study were 1) investigating the factors of using adaptation strategy in Persian translation of “Half life 2” and 2) identifying the ideologies that the use of adaptation strategy factors indicates in the society. To this end, first a corpus of expressions of a videogame called “Half life 2” and their Persian translations were selected and analyzed. Then, according to (Bastin's, 2005) adaptation model, adaptation strategy factors were identified. Finally, the ideologies that the use of adaptation strategy factors indicates in the current society were recognized. The findings revealed that in addition to the adaptation factors in (Bastin's, 2005) model, politeness was also regarded as an adaptation strategy factor. The reasons for using politeness were “euphemism” and “showing power”. The findings indicated that since videogames are deductive (as cited in Orero, 2004), euphemism has been used as a way to regard politeness in adaptation strategy. The findings also showed that translating the expressions into imperative sentences in the translation of the videogames represent the power of the main character.