A Comparative Study of the Intersemiotic Translation of Book Covers in Post-Revolutionary Iran

This study aims to explore the inter-semiotic translation of book covers originally designed in English and translated into Persian in post-revolutionary Iran. It specifically tries to examine the extent to which the cover designs of the translations are congruent with their content, reflect the ideological divergence from English language cover, and mirror the sociocultural context of the source and the target societies. The study relied on Kress and Leeuwen’s (۲۰۰۶) visual grammar to analyse the covers and Nikolajeva and Scott’s (۲۰۰۰) model to determine the type of dynamics between the source and target covers. The book covers of Hillary Clinton’s What Happened (۲۰۱۷) and Michelle Obama’s Becoming (۲۰۱۸) and three different Persian translations of each (eight covers on the whole) were selected as the corpus. They contain the image of their authors as the central element. The results revealed that the designers’ decisions in the analysed books were different. In Obama’s memoire, there was an almost complete correspondence between the source and target book covers, the translated covers were faithful to the source and established a symmetrical relationship in rendering both the linguistic and visual elements of the source book. However, in Clinton’s memoire none of them was realized, and the relationship appeared to be a contradictory one. They suggest that the translation of cover designs should depend on the taste of the translator and the publisher rather than the conditions and ideology of the society.