A Study of Rendering Strategies for Proper Names in the Persian Translations of English Novels

One of the important problems in translation is translating proper names from one language into another. The dictionary defines proper name (proper noun) as «a word that is the name of a person، a place، an institution، etc. and is written with a capital letter.» The present paper intends to investigate different strategies applied in the translation of proper names. The main concern of this study is to investigate strategies applied in translating proper names in English novels. To this end، three English novels، including “And Then There Were None”، “Great Expectations”، and “Hard Times” were compared with their Persian translation and analyzed based on Sarkka’s (2007) model to see the changes that occur in the process of translation. This model includes five strategies including transliteration، transcription، substitution، partial translation، and deletion. One hundred proper names were selected from the novels and compared with their Persian translations. The results show that the transliteration emerged as the most conspicuous procedure (42. 2%) in translating proper names and transcription (18. 06%) and partial translation (13. 66%) follow in frequency