Search

The lexical presence of culture in a literary work mostly appears in form of culture-specific items. Due to cultural distance, translating these challenging elements, i.e. culture-specific items, is of real significance in the translation process. Translating these items entails, among others, adopting the dichotomy of Domestication or Foreignization. The present study sought to find which of the strategies was used more frequently in the English translation of the Persian literary masterpiece Shazdeh Ehtejab, translated by Buchan (2005). To do so, at first, thirty-four culture-specific items were extracted and then analyzed according to Newmark’s categorization (1988) of culture-specific items. Then, these items were examined according to Aixela’s model of translating culture-specific items (1996), which divides all the strategies into two broader categories of Domestication and Foreignization, to find the more frequent strategy. The result showed that Domestication with eighty-two percent was more frequent, which stood as the main approach of the translator. Moreover, as a subcategory of Domestication, synonymy was the most frequent strategy with thirty-nine percent. By applying domesticated equivalents, the translator hides the local color of the source text. The findings in this study have pedagogical implications for literary translators.

Movies are significant art forms that can potentially reflect life, culture, world, or thought of a society and present it to another society. Movie titles are the indivisible part of the movies. Translating movie titles is an arduous activity owing to its leading role in movies. Foreign movies are rapidly translated from English to Persian, while translation of Persian movies to English still has not received much attention. Therefore, the present study attempts to investigate the translation of 64 Persian movie titles with the intention of analyzing translation strategies used. The model proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet was used as the theoretical framework of this study to check up on each strategy used for translation of these 64 Persian to English movie titles. The results show that the most frequent translation strategy is literal translation in the translation of movie title from Persian to English, which is in line with the results of English to Persian, or English to Chinese translation of movie titles which were done in other studies. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n20p2568