A Comparative study of Translation of Animal-Related Words in English, Portuguese and Persian

The study aimed to illustrate how exploring the origins of metaphors contribute in a better understanding of the nature of metaphors and, thus, in preventing mistranslation. In translation of animal personification, where the metaphoric meanings of animals in the source language (SL) are different from or contradictory to those in the target language (TL), the translators usually choose a different animal in the target text (TT) whose characteristics match the ones attributed to it in the source text (ST). The task becomes more complicated in translation of Animal Farm (Orwell, 1945) (the present study), where the image of some animals is different even between the SL and the ST. Accordingly, different translation strategies were proposed depending on the relationship between the SL, the ST, and the TL. We studied personification in three languages of Persian as a high-context culture, Portuguese as a low context-culture, and English as a lower-context culture language in comparison with the Portuguese. We tried to examine if the degree of context culture between languages involved in translation influences the degree of differences in personification of the animals in theses languages. The proposed translation strategies were based on the premise that a translator in normal circumstances would go through these translational phases. However, this study (translation of Animal Farm) revealed that theory cannot bring about a satisfactory answer to all the translation problems. Because theories are descriptive and each text is singularly different from the other and nothing can be deemed wholly predictable in terms of translation.