Strategies and challenges in translating english idioms into Thai in Hillary Clinton's memoir hard choices

Abstract

The present study aimed to explore the strategies used in translating from English into Thai the idiomatic expressions used by Hilary Rodham Clinton in her memoir Hard Choices. The strategies for dealing with idiom translation proposed by Baker (2011) were adopted as the framework for data analysis in which the nature and frequency of use of each strategy were determined. The challenges in translating from English into Thai the idiomatic expressions and the strategies the translator employed in the translated version called ชีวิตและทางเลือก (Life and Choices) when dealing with such challenges were also investigated. A questionnaire and an in-depth interview were used as methods of data collection regarding the challenges the translator encountered and the strategies she applied while translating Hard Choices’s idioms into Thai. The results revealed that all six strategies were used in the English-to-Thai translation of 147 idioms.The strategy of translation by paraphrase, which tended to simplify lexical complexities arisen in the idiom translation process, was most frequently found, accounting for 59.9%. The results also revealed that there were three challenges in idiom translation and that the translator coped with these idiom translation challenges by using various approaches. It could then be concluded that besides the correctness in idiom translation the translator's main focus of idiom translation in Hard Choices was to transfer the meaning of idioms, which are complicated lexical items, as simply as possible for better understanding of the target language readers.