Abstract:
There have always been problems translating culture-specific items because of the differences betweenthe source and target language cultures. For example, differences exist between languages regardingreligions, rituals, clothes, food, and communication norms, though some cultures may be extremelyclose. The present study aimed to examine the strategies used to translate the culture-specific items inthe novel “Inferno” (Brown, 2013) from English into Persian by the Iranian translator Manizhe Jalali(2013). The data was first extracted from the source text based on Newmark’s (1988) and Aixela’s(1996) theoretical models. Then, Vinay and Darbelnet’s classification (1958) was applied to find thestrategies used by the translator to render culture-specific items. To achieve the study's goal, theresearcher extracted 1000 culture-specific items from the novel “Inferno.” The Persian translations ofthese items were studied using a corpus-based and descriptive design to recognize the equivalentschosen by the translator. The content analysis results indicated that the translator used 12 different typesof strategies: borrowing, literal translation, adaptation, explicitation, generalization, amplification,transposition, calque, particularization, reduction, equivalence, and implicitation. The results alsoshowed that borrowing, literal translation, and amplification were the most prevailing and frequentlyapplied translation procedures, while equivalence, particularization, implicitation, and transpositionwere the least frequently utilized ones. It was also found that no modulation strategy was used regardingculture-specific items in the translation of the novel “Inferno” from English into Persian. The results ofthis study are helpful for general readers, translators, and translation teachers to select the moreappropriate translation strategies, which results in a better understanding of literary books.