Traces of Translators' Occidentalism in the Translations of Post-Colonial Novels into Farsi: The Case Studies of Burmese days, A Passage to India and Heart of Darkness

Subject Areas : All areas of language and translation

katayoon Afzali ¹ , Akram Koochehbaghi ²

1 - Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics, English Department, Sheikhbahaee State University, Isfahan, Iran
2 - MA in Translation Studies, English Department, Sheikhbahee State University, Isfahan, Iran

Received: 2021-01-29 Accepted : 2021-01-29 Published : 2021-01-01

Keywords: Translation strategies, Ideology, Occidentalism, Post-colonialism, Postcolonial novels,

Abstract :

The cultural turn in Translation Studies puts the emphasis on the role of social and political factors in translation. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, anti-Western discourse became dominant in the country. Given this change, the present research aimed to study the representation of colonizers in the translations of post-colonial novels into Farsi. To this end, Burmese Days by George Orwell, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and A Passage to India by Edward Morgan Forster and their translations into Farsi were studied, and the parts representing colonizers were discerned and com- pared with their Farsi translations. The results show that translators used amplification, modulation, particularization, and generalization to represent their anti-Western ideologies. The findings indicate how anti-Western discourse of society was reflected in the translations of post-colonial novels.

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