Manipulation in Drama translation: A case study of Waiting for Godot

2016 IJRSLL – Volume 5 Issue 4

Author/s:

Vasheghani Farahani, Mehrdad
Islamic Azad University; Science & Research Branch, Tehran, Iran (Mehrdadfarahani1365@gmail.com)

Arbabi, Maryam*
Islamic Azad University, Central Branch, Tehran, Iran (arbabi22@gmail.com)

Abstract:

The present case study attempted to probe into one of most appealing translations of “Waiting for Godot”, from English into Persian, which was manipulated in the process of translation and to investigate the manipulative strategies and to  identify the most frequent one in them. The corpus selected for this study is a bilingual parallel corpus comprising an English-Persian translation of the originally French play called Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett. The English component of the corpus was translated by Beckett himself. The Persian component, however, was translated by Ali-akbar Alizadeh. The present research was limited to ‘manipulation as distortion’ category of Dukate’s (2007) general manipulation typology. As the data demonstrated, “substitution” was the strategy most-frequently applied by the translator when translating “Waiting for Godot”; covering 142 items. The next frequent strategy was “addition”; covering 49 cases. “Omission” ranked next to “addition”, as the third most-frequently applied strategy; 23 items had been omitted.

Keywords: drama translation; manipulation; manipulation schools; translation strategies

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrsll.2016.1316

*Corresponding Author