An expositional study on the translation processes of politeness strategies through register analysis

English (OpenAlex)

It is known that every language and culture bear its own characteristics and ways of expressing politeness. However, politeness strategies that have been put forward so far have almost always referred to the pivotal taxonomy of Penelope Brown and Steven C. Levinson (1978). The four-super strategies classified to designate and adjust the appropriateness of actions or speech acts have been mostly useful, but the process of translating the strategies in question from one language to another has not only required criticism due to the uniqueness of languages but also led to modification at linguistic level. The motivation of creating the correspondent politeness strategy in the target language has provided translators with some amount of liberty, which has helped them deal with the phenomenon through functionality. The functional equivalence suggested by Juliane House and Basil Hatim and Ian Mason requires the analysis of register; field, mode and tenor. This study aims to assess the translational processes of requests, an example of directives, with a comparative approach comparing the four randomly chosen samples extracted from three translated versions of the worldwide famous play of Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman. The core of the analysis is to assess the translation of negative, positive, bald on record and off record politeness strategies and note if any drastic deviations are made in the target texts that may potentially distort interpersonal relations and balance and the context of situation designated by the author for the original text.