“May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favour”: Translating English Idioms in The Hunger Games into Thai
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Abstract
Idioms are one of the most challenging aspects in translation due to linguistic and cultural differences between the source language and the target language. Translators use several strategies when dealing with various types of idioms within one text. Therefore, the objective of this research is to find out the types of English idioms found in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2011) and translation strategies used to translate these English idioms into Thai including their potential relationship which is rarely studied. A total of 188 data collected from the English novel were categorized into idiom types (Seidl & McMordie, 1988) and their Thai translations by Nara Supakroj were analyzed to identify the most frequently used strategies, based on Baker’s framework (2011). The analysis showed that all 8 types of idioms by Seidl & McMordie (1988) were found in the novel, which are: key words with idiomatic uses, idioms with nouns and adjectives, idiomatic pairs, idiom with prepositions, phrasal verbs, verbal idiom, idioms with keywords from special categories, and idioms of comparison. Verbal idioms were the most prevalent, with 89 tokens (45.18%). Regarding idiom translation strategies, 5 out of 6 idiom translation strategies listed by Baker (2011) were found with translation by paraphrase being the most frequently, used, accounting for 142 idioms (72.08%), while omission with a play on idiom was not found in the data collected. Its easy accessibility to the idiom’s meaning tends to be one of the reasons for using translation by paraphrase, making it useful in conveying appropriate meanings in each context especially when there is no equivalent idiom in the target language, or the idiom has multiple meanings.
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