(Un)Translatability of Persian Idiomatic Expressions to English in Political Discourse

The present study sought to investigate the extent to which Persian idiomatic expressions would influence the western translators' strategies in providing the ultimate product in English, and it also attempted to uncover the underlying assumptions in target text, then to suggest some weighty strategies to overcome difficulties with translation. For this purpose, the data was analyzed within the mentioned framework proposed by Mona Baker (1992) that are four problem-solving strategies to overcome the difficulties of idiomatic translation. For that purpose, at first the texts of Mr. Ahmadinejad's speeches were selected from the Iranian government news agency website. Then the renditions of transcriptions of the news were excerpted from the Western English media. After all the data were collected, the descriptive and test statistics provide us a help to see the frequent type of the strategies used to overcome difficulties with translating idiomatic expressions. Totally, according to the table, 30 idiomatic expressions were randomly selected in his speeches. Among these strategies, “translation by omission” was the most frequently used, and the other three expressions of “Using an idiom of similar meaning and form”, “Using an idiom of similar meaning and dissimilar form”, and “Translation by paraphrase” formed the other half.  Accordingly, the research null-hypothesis that states, “There are no specific translation strategies of idiomatic expressions in political discourse” is rejected, and we can claim that there were specific translation strategies of translation of idiomatic expressions in Mr. Ahmadinejad's political discourse by Western media.