Investigating Translation Strategies of Culture-Specific Items in Alignment with Nord’s Binary Translation Typology: A Case Study of Unaccustomed Earth

Subject Areas : All areas of language and translation

Matin Seif Sheshnavi ¹ , Reza Deedari ²

1 - Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Islamic Azad University, South Tehran Branch
2 - Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Islamic Azad University, South Tehran Branch

Received: 2014-05-11 Accepted : 2014-11-12 Published : 2014-12-25

Keywords: culture- culture-specific items- documentary translation- instrumental translation,

Abstract :

Culture is an extremely complex concept. Translating cultural elements is a demanding task due to the fact that these elements comprise specific meanings and implications belonging exclusively to the lan-guage and culture from which they have emerged. Regarding this point, the present article investigated the strategies employed for translating culture-specific items (CSIs) in an English novel, Unaccustomed Earth (2008) by Lahiri, which was rendered into Persian by three translators. After extracting and clas-sifying CSIs based on Pavlovic and Poslek’s categorization (1999), the translation strategies were de-termined in the three Persian TTs according to Davies’ model (2003), and then, the researchers went on to compare every source item to its three target equivalents, which were in turn compared to one anoth-er, to determine their translation strategies. It should be mentioned that a total of 284 CSIs were identi-fied. Finally, the frequency of the strategies was computed and the strategies were classified under Nord’s binary translation typology (2005) in order to pinpoint whether each TT belonged to documen-tary or instrumental type. According to the results, preservation was the dominant translation strategy in the three TTs, and all the TTs belonged to documentary translation.