Idiomatic Expressions of the Sewing Frame in English and their Persian Counterparts: Nida's Dynamic Equivalence Theory in Focus

Translation is an act of communication across dissimilar cultures. In as such, cultural expressions or idioms are a particularly salient translation challenge, especially when translating between two distinct languages spoken by two different nations. Idioms convey rich cultural connotations, and so require consideration of both cultural and linguistic dissimilarities when providing for translation. This article describes findings for idiomatic expressions within the sewing frame and their Persian equivalences in the framework of Nida's Dynamic Equivalence theory to answer such questions of translation. Specifically, to what extent Persian idiomatic expressions overlap this frame in English connotatively is explored on one hand; as compared to their differences in using source domains, on the other. To do so, twenty four sewing frame idiomatic expressions in English were collected from the work of Uberman (2008), website of http://www.UsingEnglish.com/idiom.asp, http://goenglish.com/idiom.asp and http://www.idiomeanings.com. Next their Persian equivalences were searched for and directly compared. The results show that the overlapping of idioms in this frame is mostly connotatively oriented and that there are some English expressions that have zero idiomatic equivalence in Persian.