The challenges of implicatures and dealing with them in Persian dubbing

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Assistant professor of Translation Studies, Department of English Translation, Faculty of Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran

2 Associate professor of Translation Studies Department of English Language, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

Abstract

Various articles have addressed the field of audiovisual translation and its related issues, but the pragmatic aspects of this area have not been addressed as they should be. As pragmatic issues are mainly covert in dialogues, and films are dialogue-oriented, it is crucial to consider these aspects in this area. Implicature is one of these hidden aspects of meaning which challenges the translators’ knowledge and competency. Sometimes ignoring this pragmatic aspect results in misinterpreting the intended meaning of the original version, whether it is a text or a film. Therefore, the present study intends to examine the translation of implicatures and their intricacies in Persian dubbing. To this end, four American films (Notting hill, The bucket list, The ultimate gift and Still Alice) were selected, all of which had been dubbed into Persian. All parts of these films were analyzed to determine whether there is any mismatch between original and dubbed versions in terms of this pragmatic aspect. The translation techniques and their frequency of occurrences which were applied to translate this pragmatic aspect are illustrated too. The results indicate that there are mismatches between the original and dubbed versions in terms of implicature, and the most frequent number of mismatches refers to scalar implicatures. Conventional and conversational implicatures follow it respectively. Moreover, deletion is the most frequent translation strategy which was applied to render this pragmatic aspect.

Keywords

References

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Applied Linguistics Inquiry
Volume 3, Issue 2
September 2025
Pages 108-117

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History

  • Receive Date: 17 February 2025
  • Revise Date: 18 June 2025
  • Accept Date: 04 July 2025

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