An Analysis of Discourse Markers in English Movies Subtitled into Persian in Terms of Nida's Equivalents[پايان نامه لاتين]

Sara Tajmiri

The primary goal of the current study was to investigate the strategies employed in translating discourse markers in the subtitles of a series of American movies into Farsi. To This end, 29 recent movies from various genres including dramas, comedies, bibliographic films, hero dramas, romantic dramas, action comedies, sports dramas, and thrillers were randomly selected and the discourse markers used in the subtitles of these films were categorised based on Fraser’s (1999) model of DMs. Then, the strategies employed for their translation by the Iranian translators of the subtitles were taken into consideration based on Nida’s (2000) typology of formal and dynamic equivalents. The frequency and percentage of the strategies used as well as the most frequently used one was computed and the results were used to answer the research questions of the study. The results of data analysis firstly revealed that out of the translation strategies proposed by Nida, mainly, formal equivalent strategy was applied in the translation of DMs in the movies subtitled into Persian. Secondly, it was revealed that for all the DMs proposed by Fraser (1999), the share of formal translation has been more than dynamic translation. In this regard, 67.61% of Elaborative Markers were translated formally, while 17.11% of them were translated dynamically. In the case of Inferential Markers 60.00% were translated formally, while 32.30% were translated dynamically. Also, 73.91% of the Contrastive Markers were translated formally, while no Contrastive Marker was translated dynamically, and finally, 50.00% of the total number of Topic Change Markers were translated formally, while 40.90% were translated dynamically. However, 09.09% of this type of DM was omitted and not translated at all. The findings of the present study can be employed by Iranian movie translators and subtitle developers to be more conscious while translating English discourse markers to Persian. Also, the present study findings could have implications for translator trainers an, English translation students in the Iranian context.