The Role of Institutional Rules in Translators’ Manipulation of Texts: The Case of Patient Information Leaflets in Iran

Abstract

Since the emergence of the cultural turn in translation studies, external factors affecting translation have re- ceived attention in this field. Macro factors such as culture, politics in target contexts, history, ideological manipulation, and translators’ institutional rules have become the concern of translation studies. Consider- ing these factors, the current study aimed to identify the manipulative strategies used by translators in trans- lating patient information leaflets (PILs) from English into Farsi. To this end, 30 parallel corpus of PILs were compared to identify the translation strategies used in them; subsequently, an interview was conducted with 10 administrators of pharmaceutical companies to find out the reasons why these particular strategies were used by translators. The findings showed that translators used three main translation strategies, namely addition, deletion, and transliteration to manipulate texts in the process of PILs translation. The interview results indicated that translators intend to enforce institutional setting rules by adopting these particular translation strategies.