Application of Lefevere’s Seven Strategies in English Translations of Sohrab Sepehri’s Poems

Abstract

Amid translation subjects, poetry translation is the most controversial issue caused by the existing conflict between form and content and also high figurative language of poetry. Poetry interested translator needs more effort and creativity to translate the structures and the figurative language involved in poetry (Boase Beier, 2009). The main aim of the present study is to apply Lefevere’s seven proposed strategies for poetry translation in the English translations of poems written by Sohrab Sepehri, a contemporary Persian poet and the final purpose is to find out which strategy is more frequently used. The corpus of the study contains 17 poems which are selected from three books translated by three translators. After the process of data analysis and calculating the frequency of each strategy, the researcher arrived at the conclusion that the second strategy named literal translation was the most frequently applied strategy (63%) by the three different translators. The results confirm that all the translators have translated the poems as word for word rendering.