Translation of Philosophical Terms: Strategies Used by Male and Female Translators

This research sought to identify the translation strategies employed by male and female translators for the rendition of philosophical terms in two Persian translations of Explaining Post-modernism from Skepticism to Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, based on Vinay and Darbelnet’s model. To achieve this objective, a mixed-methods design was used. The corpus of the study consisted of 100 pages from the English book along with their Persian translations by Poursafir, Zohrabi, and Ehsani. The results obtained from the statistical analysis of the elicited data showed that Zohrabi and Ehsani have employed literal translation, translation by paraphrase, content transposition, form transposition, borrowing, and deletion strategies in translating philosophical terms into Persian. The most and the least frequent strategy applied by them were literal translation and deletion, respectively. The results also revealed that Poursafir has benefited from literal translation, translation by paraphrase, content transposition, form transposition, and borrowing strategies in his translation. The most and the least frequent strategy used by him were literal translation and borrowing, respectively. As for gender, while there were minor alterations between the frequencies of different strategies used by male and female translators, the differences were not significant. The findings of this study provide operational directions for future translators of philosophical works.