Semiotic Exploration of English Pictographic Representation in the Persian Translation of ‘A Diary of A Wimpy Kid’: Socio-Cultural and Ideological Values in Focus

The present study explored the Persian translation of Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ by Tabasom Atashinjan to see how semiotic items were transferred to the target texts. Kress and van Leeuwen’s Social Semiotics Theory (1996) and Farahzad's (2009) CDA model were adopted to scrutinize two volumes of the comic series: ‘Hard Luck’ and ‘The Meltdown’. The semiotic items including images, typographical features, and onomatopoeia were specified and compared in the corpus considering the social semiotics principles to pursue this goal. Furthermore, the strategies employed in translating the semiotics were scrutinized considering the Farahzad CDA framework. The findings revealed some manipulations in the target texts, due to socio-cultural or ideological stances in the society to comply with the target cultural values. The most commonly used strategies for translating semiotic items included substitution, omission, addition, and literal translation the translator applied to cope with cultural and ideological conflicts of the two cultures.