The Musts and the Must-nots for Translators (A Glance at Principles of the Free Translation of Literary Texts from English to Persian)

The present article tried to investigate the musts and the must-nots for translators. In other words, the present researcher did her best to take an analytic look at the principles of the free translation of literary texts from English to Persian.

The library-based descriptive data was collected from a variety of academic databases such as Google Scholar, Eric, and ISC from 1960 to 2021.

According to the literature theoretically and analytically reviewed as well as the present researcher’s investigation, sixteen translators’ commitments were considered as the most significant commitments of the translators as follow: avoiding word for word translation, considering characters’ positions and gender, utilizing foreign words in a translated text, following the speech of the source text, being committed to society, re-translating a text, regarding an editor for the translated text, reviewing and revisiting a translated text, domesticating SL expressions and idioms, reading other works of the same author, consulting with dictionaries, glossaries and references, omitting and adding a word if necessary, expanding vocabulary, mastering SL and TL grammars, dividing SL long sentences into smaller ones in TL and vice versa, and considering the author’s point(s) of view. The findings of the present paper may have some theoretical and practical implications for the translation trainers and trainees as well as translation researchers.