Exploring the Translation Strategies Utilized for the Rendition of Economic Terms from English into Persian

Abstract

Economics like other sciences is quickly developing due to the age of globalization and information exchange, and as a result, the need for coining new technical terms is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore nowadays. As such, providing suitable target language (TL) equivalences for English economic terms has turned into one of the key factors in the history of translation studies. Accordingly, based on a model of translation strategies by Vinay and Darblenet (1995), the present study sought to explore the strategies underlying the appropriate translation of economic terms from English into Persian. For this purpose, a corpus of 299 English economic terms was randomly extracted from Macmillan Dictionary of Modern Economics and was compared with their Persian equivalences suggested by three Iranian translators and used in three English to Persian dictionaries, all focusing on specialized vocabulary items pertinent to the field of economics. By comparing and contrasting the frequencies of the strategies used by the targeted translators, it was found out that these translators had the same preferences in choosing the strategies required for the rendition of the terms in the selected corpus from the source language (SL) into the TL. The results of the study also revealed that the most frequently used translation strategy is Literal translation. Notably, by providing insightful guidelines to professional translators, Iranian translation students, and lexicographers, the findings may have significant implications for highlighting the problems dominating the translation of economic terms from English into Persian.