Translatability and Untranslatability of Collocations in Ernest Hemingway’s Novels

Abstract

Collocations are an important phenomenon in language and in translation. Therefore, the importance of collocations in translation of literary texts as well as the ways in which they are translated is analyzed in this study. The Persian translations of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, For whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea have been compared and analyzed. In this study the main causes of the untranslatability between English and Persian have been investigated by the researcher. The notion of collocational untranslatability from Catford’s view has been applied for this study. It has investigated different strategies used in translating collocations according to Vinay and Darbelnet (1995) and Newmark’s model of translation. Benson, M., Benson, E., & Ilson. R. (1997) classifications for collocations have been adopted for this study. Collocations examined in this study included (Adj +N, V+ N / N+V, V+ Prep, N+Prep/ Prep+N, V+ Adv,). This study is a mixed method research, using both qualitative and quantitative methods.  The accuracy of selected collocations is based on Oxford Collocations Dictionary (2009).Literal translation emerged as the most conspicuous procedure (35.73%) in translating collocations in all three novels.