An Analysis of Culture-specific Items in the Persian Translation of “Dubliners” Based on Newmark’s Model

Abstract

Different cultures influence the way the members of a society view and perceive the world. This principle is important in the translation phenomenon. What is important for a translator is the purpose of conveying the message of the source text in a way understandable for the audience in the target text (TT). Therefore, every translator should have some knowledge about how to deal with different strategies of translating culture specific item (CSI); hence this issue is one of the most important concerns for all translators. In translation CSI refers to those concepts and references of the vocabulary items which are peculiar to the given culture. Sometimes these concepts and references are common to all languages, but they are expressed in a way peculiar to the culture of the source text (ST). Using an appropriate and suitable method in dealing with CSIs is one of the main duties of every translator. In this paper an attempt has been made to show how the translation of Dubliners jointly by Safaryan and Salehhosseini handle the translation of CSIs in this story based on Newmark’s model (1988). Newmark described fourteen methods for translating CSIs: transference, naturalization, cultural equivalent, functional equivalent, descriptive equivalent, componential analysis, synonymy, through-translation, shift, modulation, accepted standard translation, compensation, paraphrase, couplet and finally notes. Although there are different ways and methods for translating CSIs, we show here that the translator sometimes cannot find a completely corresponding equivalent for them in the TT. This is somehow related to Jackobson’s (1959/2000, p.114) idea that in translation “there is ordinarily no full equivalence between code- units”.