Gender-linked choice of politeness strategies applied to translation of Persian face-threatening acts into English

Abstract

In this article, we will concentrate on translation of Persian face-threatening acts (FTAs) into English. The present paper possesses both social and pragmatic objectives. These objectives are: 1) to identify the politeness strategies (PSs) applied for rendering FTAs in Persian and English languages, 2) compare and contrast the frequencies and kinds of these strategies between two source and target languages (SL and TL) to examine the discrepancies in the presentation of the PSs in two cultures and 3) to focus on the renderings of two gender groups of translators in order to establish a comparison of male and female’s translations of FTAs based on their choice and number of PSs. To gather the data, the following steps were taken: first, twenty FTAs done with different PSs (Brown and Levinson. 1987) were extracted from five Persian movies. The collected data were given to twenty male and female Persian-speaking post- graduate students of translation studies to render them into English. Then, PSs used for translating these FTAs were found in target texts and their types of strategies and frequencies were compared and contrasted with the original. As the final stage, the same comparison and contrast were done in case of the renderings of two gender groups of translators. The findings of the study indicated that from among 14 PSs applied in Persian and English, 12 PSs were commonly used in both SL and TL. Further, analysis of the data showed that although male and female translators applied the same PSs, male translators applied more PSs than females. Finally results revealed that ‘give deference’ was the most frequent PS applied by male translators while female translators used ‘give hint’ more than other PSs.