Document Type : Translation Studies

Authors

• Narjes Asgari Vartooni ¹
• Mahmoud Afrouz ²

¹ Department of English Language and Literature University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

² Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

Abstract

The diversity between a source language and a target language and the variation in their cultures make the task of finding equivalents a serious challenge. Expressive texts are among the most difficult text-types to be translated. Being deeply rooted in the culture of a nation, classical literary texts are seldom devoid of culture-specific concepts or cultural references (CRs). Sa‘di’s (1208-1291) Gulistan is a prominent masterpiece of classical Persian literature that abounds with CRs. It is translated by many translators. Anderson (1861) and Rosenbaum (2010) are among the earliest and the most recent translators of the Persian masterpiece, respectively. The paper aimed at identifying categories of CRs in translations, determining translators’ most and least frequent procedures and specifying the most challenging categories of CRs for each of them. The study aims at identifying various categories of the CRs in the Gulistan and the procedures employed by the two translators in rendering them. In order to specify the procedures, Davies’s (2003) model and Huber and Kairys’s (2021) taxonomy were used. The findings revealed that ‘substitution’, ‘literal translation’ and ‘generalization’ were averagely the most frequent procedures. Moreover, it was found that the terms belonging to the categories of ‘religion’, ‘garments’ and ‘social life’ were the most challenging concepts for the English translators.

Keywords

• Classical Persian literature
• Sa‘di
• The Gulistan
• cultural references
• translation procedures