Comparative analysis of strategies applied in persian and english translations of quranic-arabic culture bound term “jilbab” (33:59)

Abstract

Today TS focus has altered from linguistics to cultural studies. Culture is the way of life; as such every text is culturebound and includes items that are culture-specific. Translating these cultural-specific items (henceforth CSI) has made translation a complicated task. Hijab, one of the controversial issues of the present day of Islam in the world is defined in one way through presenting terms for women clothing such as “Jilbab” in Quran. Using Davies' (2003) strategies of translating CSIs, as the theoretical framework, taking the Quranic-Arabic culture bound term “Jilbab” (33:59) as the object of the study, this corpus-based comparative descriptive research was an attempt to compare totally 64 Persian and English (54 in Persian and 12 in English) translations of this term with two concerns regarding the adopted translation strategies: a) linguistic (Persian and English) concern, and b) translators' gender concern (male and female). The analysis of data showed that the most adopted strategy in both Persian and English corpus was localization (in Persian 35.71%, and in English 46.66%). Male translators in Persian had more tendency to use localization (36.53%) and female translators to addition and globalization (each 50%). Male translators in English were more inclined to localization (45.83%), and the female have used preservation, addition, globalization and localization with the same frequency (25%). Totally male translators were inclined to localization (39.47%), while the female to globalization and addition (33.33%).