Translation of Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations in Persian Political and Sport Journalistic Texts

The different writing systems of English and Persian makes translation of acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations challenging. This study aimed at finding which strategies were applied most frequently in translating acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations from English to Persian especially in journalistic texts. The study was done based on Descriptive translation study proposed by Toury. To this sense, 50 cases in the translation of acronyms, initialisms and abbreviations in political and sport news were extracted. They were compared with their translation to see which strategies were applied most. The result of the study revealed that the translators preferred to keep the same English letters in Persian language. Due to the fact that nowadays many of the literate news readers know alphabet of English, it seems reasonable to do so. However it should be noted that this method challenged text harmony. Also, the second strategy which applied more was borrowing. The result also showed that it was not any fixed rule especially in Persian journalistic writing in applying acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations.