A Comparative Study of Translation Strategies Applied in Dealing with Culture-Specific Items of Romance Novels Before and After the Islamic Revolution of Iran
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE Journal of Advances in English Language Teaching 2013; providedwww.european-science.com/jaelt by European Online Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (ES) vol.1, No.3, pp.64-75 ISSN 1805-8957 A Comparative Study of Translation Strategies Applied in Dealing with Culture-Specific Items of Romance Novels before and after the Islamic Revolution of Iran Mansoor Fahim 1, Zahra Mazaheri 2 1 Department of English, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran; 2 Islamic Azad University, Cental-Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran Received for publication: 02 June 2013. Accepted for publication: 17 July 2013. Abstract Introduction The present research is a comparative study of strate- Translation which is known as a means of commu- gies applied in translating culture-specific items (CSIs) nication between different nations with different of romance novels in the two periods in the history of languages plays a crucial role in transferring culture Iran namely, before the Islamic Revolution of Iran from one society into another. In fact a translator’s (taking place in 1979) and after the Revolution that task is far beyond a mere interlingual transfer and is‘Islamic republic government’ vs. ‘Pahlavi dynas- involves a battle between source and target cultures. ty’ in order to see how the sociocultural situations of In this respect, methods and procedures translators the respective eras have affected the choice of strate- choose to make this intercultural transfer are very gies applied by Iranian translators. In order to achieve divergent and has arisen interest in many transla- this objective, four masterpieces of English literature tion scholars. As Mizani(n.d.) asserts:‘There is a including ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘The Scarlet Letter’, long debate over when to transcribe, when to para- ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Gone with the Wind’ as well phrase, when to use cultural substitution, and last as their pertinent translations from before and after the but not least, when to coin a new word by translat- Islamic Revolution (IR) were compared and con- ing literally’. trasted. Extracting CSIs of the novels and applying However, the choice of translation strategies is Aixelá’s model (1996) for eliciting translation strate- not simply a personal or random act. According to gies, the results then were put into numerical mode in Alvarez and Vidal(1996, p.6): ‘translators are con- order to explore the frequencies of translation strate- strained in many ways: by the prevailing poetical gies applied in each period. The results of data analy- rules and norms of the time; by what the dominant sis revealed the most and least frequent strategies of institution and ideology expect of them; by the pub- each period, the significant difference between them lic for whom the translation is intendedetc’;on the and the predominance of conservative approach to- whole they are constrained within what is called so- ward the translation of CSIs of romance novels in ciocultural constraints. This indisputable fact be- both periods with a more conservative tendency be- comes more critical in case of culture-specific items fore the Revolution and more Substitution nature af- (CSIs) which are considered as a source of difficulty ter the Revolution. in translation. The strategies applied in translating these concepts vary along a scale from a more con- Keywords: Culture-specific items (CSIs), So- servative approach to a more adjusting one due to cio-cultural constraints, Translation strategies, different factors as mentioned above. Conservation strategies, Substitution strategies. Among the sociocultural factors that affect the Corresponding author: Zahra Mazaheri, Islamic Azad University,Cental-Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran. E-mail: [email protected]. Copyright © Mansoor Fahim & Zahra Mazaheri, 2013 Journal of Advances in English Language Teaching; vol.1, No. 3, pp. 64-75 64 Original article choice of a particular strategy are the translation ing “cultural references” (snell-hornby, 1988), has norms which are adjustable to the socio-political received more systematic attention from scholars. changes in societies. In other words, every ruling sys- These references are cultural phenomena specif- tem brings with itself a set of norms and conventions ic to the source culture. Here what has particular- to be observed by the rest of society from whom trans- ly attracted the attention of scholars is the transla- lators are no exceptions. In this regard translation of tion strategies adopted in rendering these references novels, especially romance novels as one of the most which are predictably difficult to be understood by popular genres among readers of any age and with any target group in the target culture. educational background, provides the ground for re- Opponents of this movement dismiss the linguis- searchers to investigate how changes in political-cul- tic theories of translation and go beyond language fo- tural policies implemented by different ruling systems cusing on ‘the interaction between translation and over time influences the choice of strategies by trans- culture, on the way culture impacts and constrains lators. This type of novels is also full of cultural cat- translation and on the important issues of context, egories since every community interprets romance in history and convention’ (Mizani, n.d.). As Snell- its own way and consequently portrays it differently. Hornby in 1990 puts it: ‘Cultural Turn is the move In this respect, the present study aims to illus- from translation as text to translation as culture and trate how different political-cultural policies imple- politics’ (p. 42). In other words, Cultural Turn is the mented by different ruling systems in Iran, namely; metaphor used by translation theorists to the analysis Pahlavi dynasty vs. Islamic Republic government, of translation in its cultural, political and ideological during pre-IR and post-IR periods may provide dif- context. ferent orientation, either consciously or subcon- Accordingly, Bassnett and Lefever who believe in sciously, on the side of translators and then affect translation as a major shaping force in the develop- their choice of specific strategies of translating CSIs ment of world culture, in their article “The translation of romance novels during the translation process. turn in cultural studies” explain the cultural turn as: a way of understanding how complex manipula- Research Questions tive textual processes take place: how a text is se- The present study seeks to find answers to the fol- lected for translation, for example, what role the lowing questions: translator plays in that selection, what role an edi- 1. What are the dominant strategies of trans- tor, a publisher or patron plays, what criteria de- lating CSIs of romance novels before and after the termine the strategies that will be employed by the Islamic Revolution of Iran? translator, how a text might be received in the tar- 2. What are the overall tendencies (conserva- get system. (Bassnett & Lefevere, 1998, p.123). tion vs. substitution) of translating CSIs of romance novels before and after the Islamic Revolution of Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) Iran? Dealing with the cultural aspect of translation calls 3. Is there any significant difference between foran agreement on what should be designated as the frequencies of the strategies used in translating culture-specific items. Halloran (2006), for exam- CSIs of romance novels in the two periods? ple, believes that CSIs pertains to a particular cul- ture and refer to cultural identities which do not Background have direct equivalents in another culture. In this category includes references to the institutions, his- Cultural Turn in Translation Studies tory, toponymy, or art of a given culture. Cultural turn in translation studies which was first Nord uses the term ‘cultureme’ to refer to these introduced by Even-Zohar (1978) and Toury (1980) CSIs. He defines cultureme as ‘a cultural phenom- is, according to Munday (2001), “the move towards enon that is present in culture X but not present the analysis of translation from a cultural studies an- (in the same way) in culture Y’ (Nord 1997, p. 34). gle”. As the need for intercultural awareness grows, Or Aixelá who calls them “Culture-Specific items we observe cultural turn in any discipline from (CSIs) (the term adopted in this study) due to the which translation studies is not an exception, lead- fact that there always exists a potential translation ing to a change in many traditional subjects. There- problem in a concrete situation between the two fore the cultural dimension of translation, includ- languages and two texts. He defines CSIs as: Openly accessible at http://www.european-science.com /jaelt 65 Original article Those textually actualized items whose func- fore the concrete contextualization of the CSI takes tion and connotation in a source text involve place, given both intertextual tradition and possible a translation problem in their transference to linguistic coincidence’ (Aixelá, p.68). a target text, whenever this problem is a prod- In the meantime, scholars such asNewmark uct of the nonexistence of the referred item or (1988), Espindola&Vasconcellos (2006) and Chung- of its different intertextual status in the cultural ling (2010) have tried to classify CSIs into different system of the readers of the target text (p.58). categories which make them easily recognizable in In Aixelá’s viewpoint any ‘linguistic item’ is an any text. These classifications, however, do over- CSI depending on its function in the text, the way it lap for the most part. Considering the CSI catego- is perceived in the target culture or whether it poses ries proposed by these scholars, the categorization ideological or cultural opacity for the average read- used in the present research as a validity criterion for er. By speaking of the nature of a CSI, he refers to investigating CSIs is a combination of their findings ‘the type and the breaths of the intercultural gap, be- which are presented in the following table.