The present research explores translation procedures and strategies employed in current English-Kurdish translation of written media discourse. It is located within Toury’s (1995/2012) framework of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS). The research sets out to contribute to Translation Studies, specifically the study of journalism translation. Despite the fact that translation has been an inseparable part of media and journalism activities for decades, if not centuries, the systematic study of media translation is as recent as the turn of the new millennium. This study focuses on English-Kurdish translation of written media discourse, which has remained largely under-researched.
The study precisely sets out to identify the patterns of translation procedures and the overall translation strategies prevalent in Kurdish translations of English journalistic texts. To do so, a composite model is formulated based on an integration of three influential taxonomies of translation procedures proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/1995), Newmark (1988) and Dickins, Hervey and Higgins (2002). The model is applied to a set of 45 journalistic texts translated from English into Kurdish, which altogether make a corpus of approximately 75,000 words. A comparative analysis of ST-TT coupled pairs is carried out to identify patterns of translation procedures at the linguistic as well as cultural level. To look at the findings from a different perspective, a research questionnaire is also conducted with English-Kurdish translators working in the Kurdish media. Based on the patterns of translation procedures, the overall transition strategies are then determined.
Analysis in Chapters 6, 7 and 8 leads to the conclusion that literal translation, borrowing and omission are the most frequent translation procedures at the linguistic level, and cultural borrowing, cultural redomestication and calque are the most frequent at the cultural level, keeping in mind that the notion of cultural redomestication constitutes the present study’s major contribution to Translation Studies. As for the overall strategies, semantic translation is the predominant orientation of the linguistic aspect of the translation, while foreignization is the predominate orientation of the cultural aspect of the translation.
