Examining Idiomaticity of Short Stories in Translation: Creativity or Fidelity?

Idiomatic expressions serve a pivotal role in conveying meanings, evoking feelings, and introducing cultural-historical backgrounds whose proper rendition into meaningful equivalents is one of the most demanding parts of translation enterprise. This challenging task largely depends on the creativity of the translator who seeks to maintain the stylistic balance between the source text (ST) and target text (TT). This study examines the translator’s creativity in terms of different idiomatic expressions used in the Persian translations of The Bet, The Story-Teller, and The Closed Shop, which were analyzed through content analysis. The results of comparison and contrast of the TTs with their STs indicated that the translator not only conveyed the essence of the STs’ idiomatic expressions preserving most of their semantic aspects but also used some appropriate idioms in the TTs corresponding to non-idiomatic STs. As it apparently seems that the English language is possibly richer in idioms than Persian, the findings tend to suggest the translator’s creativity in the use of idiomatic expressions.