حسن هاشمی میناباد

The close relationship between language and culture has led to the emergence of a concept regarding special words, phrases, and combinations that are referred to in translation studies as "cultural elements"; the structures which are specific to a particular society and language. The translation of these words, especially in literary texts and poetry, has always been a problem for translators. They have taken measures to translate them and have used strategies and techniques. The experts of translation have suggested methods for translating such elements. Molina and Albir (2002), while reviewing the researches in this field, have proposed eighteen strategies that have been the theoretical basis of the present research. In the present article, the cultural elements of the book A City Under Siege written by Habib Ahmadzadeh (2011) which was translated by Paul Sprachman (2010) are extracted and the strategies used by the translator in translating them based on the model of Molina and Albir are examined. Generalization and omitted equivalents are Sprachman's most widely used strategies, and there are many cases of mistranslation and omission of cultural elements. Such studies can help improve the work of translators and the theorists of translation.

Because of being culture-bound and language-specific features, Persian and Islamic mystical terminology pose many difficulties for those who translate from Persian into English. Throughout the long history of inter-lingual relations, translators employed strategies and techniques for translating the terms of Persian Islamic mystical terms, attaining different degrees of success or somehow failed. In the present study, which is a descriptive and library research, 20 Persian mystical terms along with their 20 derivatives and their English equivalents are chosen from the specific corpora. The data are analyzed according to the principle of translation studies and contrastive linguistics, the strategies used in the sample are identified and described, the characteristics of the equivalents are examined semantically and pragmatically, and the (dis)advantages of equivalents and strategies are described. The findings show that it is essential for translators to compare and contrast the term and its equivalent(s) in terms of their semantic components and pragmatics. Furthermore, their cultural and linguistic features are to be taken into consideration. Finally, the closest natural equivalents can be selected. It is evident that one-to-one correspondence between the items of the two languages are relatively rare. However, the translators can pave their ways by componential analysis, contrastive linguistics and using the strategies discussed here to provide a good translation.