Bakerian non-equivalence translation strategies in novel vs short story: The case study of matilda vs landlady and other short stories

Abstract

This study means to improve the translation quality of two closely related literary genres; novel and short stories by determining the most frequently used Bakerian strategies for dealing with non-equivalences at word level. For this end, the English source texts, Matilda (which is a novel) and landlady and other short stories (which is a collection of short stories) are compared with their Farsi target texts to quantitatively study the frequency of Baker’s translation strategy. The purpose is first to evaluate if there is any meaningful difference between the implementation of Bakerian non-equivalence translation strategies between a novel and a short story collection. The purpose is also to study if the narrative context affects the translation of non-equivalence and if the shortness, compactness and brevity of the short story as determining genre related factors can affect textual-cultural aspect of translation and the implementation of the selected translation strategy. The findings of this study prove that translation using a loan word or loan word plus explanation is the most frequently used strategy in both works, though it is more frequently used in short story (83%) than in novel (58%). The findings of this study can be used as one contributing factor along with other factors for translation quality assessment of the two studied prose narrative genres; novel and short story.