Proverb Translation Essay

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Strategies Used To Translate Proverbs Abstract The fact that proverbs are always language- and culture-specific material makes also the translation of proverbs an important and interesting area of study. Since each language has its own ways of expressing certain things, corresponding expressions may not be found in another language. This property of being a culture specific makes the translation of proverbs sometimes rather challenging, and proverbs are indeed considered as one of the most complicated elements of language in terms of their translatability - hence I feel it is important to take a closer look at their possible translation strategies. To sum up, this study seeks an answer to the question of what kinds of translation strategies can be used in the translation of proverbs and what happens to source language proverbs when they are translated to another language. Keywords: translation, proverbs, equivalent, culture-specific concepts 1. Introduction Meider (2001) has defined the proverb as "a short, generally known sentence of the folk which contains wisdom, truth, morals, and traditional views in a idiomatic, fixed and memorizable form and which is handed down from generation to generation". Proverbs are the symbols of a nation's manners, behaviors, traditions, customs and culture which indicate the life style of those particular people during years. They reflect the way that a particular group of people think, imagine, act or believe as one of the aspects of their culture which is different from other nations and they face them every day. In other words, "differences between different cultures are symbolized by the elements of language such as idioms and proverbs, and studying these languages and comparative analysis of idioms and proverbs between languages lead to realization of differences and similarities which exist between
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