Conversational Implicatures in English Plays and Their Persian Translations: A Norm-governed Study

The present study attempted to describe in full detail the status of implicature translation in two 20-year time periods before and after Iran Islamic Revolution to provide a clear picture of the strategies applied by translators in the two eras and, as its main objective, to shed light on the translational norms of this linguistic element. To this end, it first sought to elaborate on the reasons and the ways they emerge in conversations. Accordingly, identifying the implicatures arose due to the violation of Grice’s (1975) four maxims of conversation, the researcher separately categorized the translations of the implicatures based on Desilla’s (2009) classification. As the last phase of the study, the strategies for implicature translation were thoroughly scrutinized with the hope to determine the dominant norms of implicature translation in light of Toury’s (1995) notion of initial norm. Based on the results obtained from both pre- and postrevolution data, preservation was revealed to be the most frequent strategy in both eras, attesting to the significance of the adequacy of implicature translation; modification and explicitation were the second and the third most frequent strategies respectively. However, the frequency of modification and explicitation increased in the post-revolution translations. It seems that the trend of the norm of implicature translation moves toward acceptability.