Translating Idioms: A Study on English Translation of The Date Palm

The present study sought to investigate the idiomatic expressions in a literary Text based on Baker's (19992) model. More specifically, this study is conducted to find strategies for translating idioms into the English language. It also highlighted if Baker’s strategies were distributed equally through English translation. More importantly, the shortcomings of the idiom translations were presented. The corpus is composed of Moradi Kermani's The Date Palm as Source Text (ST), with the English translation as Target Text (TT) by Croskery (2017). Based on the received data, "translation by paraphrase" strategies have been used in many cases and frequently by the translator. This strategy is most commonly used in translating idioms when the translator cannot find any equivalents for the source idiom. The least frequent strategies related to "using an idiom of similar meaning and form" that translator attempts to find an expression in the target language which is equivalent to the source language both in terms of meaning as well as lexical items.