comparing two Farsi translations of the dialect used in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men

What is it about?

Translation from one language into another one is a challenge in its own right. This task becomes more hectic when the source text is full of vernacular dialectal expressions usually found in the language of local people. Our work explains the method/s used by two Farsi translators to translate John Steinbeck's use of such language in his famous book 'Of Mice and Men' into Farsi.

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Why is it important?

The vernacular dialect used in this novel is the common social marker for the men working together. Had the spoken lines been written in Standard English (SE), the book would have lost a great deal of its realism and its authenticity. Within the field of translation, the linguistic characteristics of some of the special literary works have traditionally been translated in ways which gradually failed to add value to its source cultures, because many translators avoided the use of nonstandard variety in their translations and simply standardized the dialect markers. It is from this position that this study shows how Persian translators use Phonological, syntactical, and morphological irregularities of colloquial Persian to show the nonstandard language of the uneducated lower-status group in the novel in order to at least partly preserve the authenticity of the author’s intentional use of characters’ informal speech.

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