Investigating the Applied Norms and Strategies for Translation of Idioms: A Corpus-Based Study of the Novel “The Old Man and the Sea”

Idioms are the fixed expressions whose meanings cannot be understood from the personal sense of the words that constitute them. When idioms are used in literary texts such as novels, the difficulty of rendering them may get even more severe. This study tries to determine the most frequent strategies used in Persian rendering of English idioms in “The Old Man and the Sea” novel. In addition, choosing the initial norm translation of Toury is the second goal of the present study. For this purpose, three Persian translations of the novel were selected by three Persian translators named Mohammadtaghi Faramarzi, Nazi Azima, and Najaf Daryabandari. Several 60 idioms were extracted from the book, and their Persian translations also were categorized. The results showed that the most translation strategies used by Mohammadtaghi Faramarzi are translation by “paraphrase using a related word”. Related to norm translation, Mohammadtaghi Faramarzi used acceptability more than adequacy norm. Translation by “paraphrase using a related word” was also used mainly by Nazi Azima. Acceptability norm is the most frequent norm used by Nazi Azima. Finally, translation by “paraphrase using unrelated words” is the most strategy used by Najaf Daryabandari. In addition, he mostly used the acceptability norm comparing to the adequacy norm.