Translating the Pragmatic Markers (just, but, oh, and, well) in the Movies The Dry and Taxi Driver 1976 from English into Kurdish

Abstract

Although pragmatic markers (PMs) play a very significant role in our daily conversation, they have been neglected in the Kurdish language. The aim of the present study is to analyse, compare and find out the translation errors and which type of error is the most common one in translating five pragmatic markers namely just, but, oh, and, and well in English movie scripts with Kurdish subtitles. To conduct this study, two movies were chosen. The movies were selected from two different decades, the 1970s and the 2020s. After the selection of the movies, five commonly used PMs which were mentioned in Brinton’s (1996) inventory of PMs were searched and obtained by the aid of computer software (Microsoft Office Word and Adobe Acrobat Reader). The obtained PMs in this study were analysed carefully by the researcher and errors in translation were identified. The results reveal that deletion is the most prevailing error made by Kurdish translators in the translation of PMs in movie subtitles followed by foreign translation and translation into a different PM and mistranslation errors.