idioms in persian translations of tefl students and their attitudes toward translating idiomatic expressions

Idioms are mostly fixed expressions whose meanings cannot be understood from the individual meaning of the words they constitute. many idioms are culturally linked. therefore, translating them is not an easy task. when idioms are used in literary texts such as stories, the difficulty in reproducing them can become even more severe. however, different methods are suggested for translating them. as such, baker (2001) offered four strategies for this purpose namely “translation by idiom of similar meaning and form”, “translation by idiom of similar meaning and dissimilar form”, “translation by paraphrase”, and “translation by omission”. since few studies have been conducted regarding this issue, the present study was to determine the most frequently used strategy in persian rendering of english idioms in students’ translations of specific literary texts and to investigate the problems encountered by tefl students in translating english idioms into persian or vice versa set up some solutions. to achieve this aim, this study followed two phases. in the first phase, six texts contain 103 idiomatic expressions were chosen and 22 students of tefl were asked to translate each text individually. after that, each translation was analyzed and the idioms and their translations were extracted, classified, and inserted into the table. then the applied strategies were identified and the frequency of each strategy was calculated. in the second phase, by employing a descriptive-analytic method a questionnaire was adopted and used as a data collection instrument. the results indicated that the most frequently used strategy is “translation by paraphrase”, and the least frequently used one is “translation by omission”. however, the strategy of “translation by idiom of similar meaning and form” is used less by the students which can be related to the fact that idioms are language-specific and culture-bound items. consequently, the differences in the average of the consensus are in line with the variables that translating idioms is a problematic area for efl students. likewise, efl students are confused in translating idioms from english to persian and vice versa due to poor vocabulary and fixed idiomatic expressions