International Journal of Language & Linguistics

A Study of Persian Translations of English Phrasal Verbs in Dan Brown’s Inferno
Hossein Tarighi, MA; Ali Rabi, Ph.D

Abstract
This study focuses on translation of the English phrasal verbs (PVs) into Persian as to determine the frequency and usage percentage of the eleven translation procedures, which Persian translators preferred to use; that is to determine which procedure was the most favored among Persian translators in rendering PVs into Persian in as far as textual and contextual parameters are concerned. The typological syntactic and semantic features marking English PVs are not normatively present in the Persian language, which belongs to a different branch of Indo-European family. That makes translation of these units a somewhat burdensome task for the Persian translators. Three available Persian translations of Dan Brown’s Inferno (2013) serve the corpus for this product-oriented analysis, which builds upon Baker’s (2011) taxonomy of translation strategies (here referred to as procedures) for non-equivalence at word level. That has not of course been without adding a few more procedures to it- forming a mixed model as to capture more of the morpho-syntactic peculiarities between the two languages- to achieve the aims of this study. Having extracted 401 PVs from 34 chapters of the novel and analyzed their translations, we made it clear that equivalence procedure has the highest frequency among all other procedures. Moreover, frequency and percentage of all other procedures were calculated and discussed.

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