Analysis of Culture-Specific Items and Translation Strategies Applied in Translating Jalal Al-Ahmad’s by the Pen

Abstract

Due to differences across languages, meanings and concepts vary across different languages, too. The most obvious points of difference between languages appear in their literature and their culture-specific items (CSIs), which lead to complexities when transferring meanings and concepts from one language into another. To overcome the complexities arisen from the distinction between languages in the process of translation, translation scholars have proposed different strategies. Newmark’s proposed taxonomy for translating CSIs is the framework for achieving this study. So, after adopting CSIs with Newmark’s (1988) 5 proposed domains of CSIs, we sought to find his proposed translation strategies applied in the English translation of Jalal Al-Ahmad’s By the Pen by Ghanoonparvar (1988) and to evaluate the frequency of each in order to determine which strategy could help the most in translating CSIs. To do so, first, both the source language text and its translation were studied; then, the translation strategies applied were found. Having found the strategies as the sources of the data, they were arranged and analyzed. Results showed that functional equivalent was the most frequently used strategy, and modulation and paraphrase were the least frequently used ones. Findings have pedagogical implications for translation students and literary translators.