Translation of Abbreviations in International Relations (IR)

Abstract

Abbreviation, as an old phenomenon in linguistics, is an inherent part of the technical texts and daily communications and as time goes on, making and using abbreviations is rapidly growing. The widespread usage of abbreviations has brought these linguistic formations into the field of translation. The present study aims to investigate differences in translation strategies of abbreviation when they appear in texts produced in different discourses and genres that need to be translated following social norms and conventions of the target language. To analyze abbreviations, their linguistic structures have been thoroughly discussed and they were analyzed according to the taxonomy proposed by Mattiello (2013). Fairclough`s (1995) model of CDA has been adopted to show that translation, as it deals with language, is a social practice and social conventions and norms govern the translation strategies of abbreviations adopted by translators. In this regard, a corpus of 300 abbreviations was circulated. 150 abbreviations were collected from 5 translated books from English to Persian in the field of IR and their translation strategies were compared to 150 abbreviations that were translated in news texts concerning the same genre. The result indicated that while abbreviations in Persian scientific books were mostly borrowed, abbreviations in Persian news texts were translated by descriptive strategy. This implies that translation practice is inconsistent with the social norms and conventions of the target language society and it is the genre and discourse of the text that determines how a text must be translated.