Culture-specific items (CSIs)

This study sought to investigate translation strategies in translation of culture-specific items (CSIs) in Persian translation of ‘The Egyptian’ novel by Mika Waltari. To this end, it benefited from corpus-based comparative content analysis design within a qualitative approach. The corpus of this study consisted of 150 pages of the novel ‘The Egyptian’ by Mika Waltari along with their Persian translations by Zabihollah Mansouri, which were selected through simple random sampling. Data analysis included parallel comparison of the source text and its translation in terms of the occurrence of different types of translation strategies used in the translations. Furthermore, statistical procedures which were conducted consisted of calculation of frequency and percentage of different translation strategies (to identify the most and least frequent strategies) and chi-square test (to see if there is a significant difference between the frequencies of different strategies used by the translator). The results of data analysis showed that the translator has used the following translation strategies: Calque, equivalence, adaptation, literal translation, modulation and omission. Moreover, it was found that the most frequent strategy was calque. Furthermore, the lowest frequency belonged to modulation and omission. In addition, a significant difference was revealed between the frequencies of different translation strategies. The findings have some implications for translation students, translation teachers, and translators.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the acceptability of two Persian translations of Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by finding the position of each Persian translation in the literary polysystem of Iran. It also aimed to identify the most/least used translation strategies applied by each Persian translator, Morteza Madaninejad (2000) and Hamideh Ashkannezhand (2004), for translating culture-specific items (CSIs) from English into Persian. To do so, CSIs were extracted from the novel and classified based on Espindola and Vasconcellos's (2006) classification of cultural items. Then, Pederson's (2005) taxonomy of translation strategies was used to analyze the two Persian translations. The results indicated that Madaninejad preferred to use source oriented strategies. Thus, the translation he produced occupied the primary position in the literary polysystem. By contrast, Ashkannezhand had an interest in the use of target -oriented strategies. The findings have implications for translators of literary texts.