Application of Cultural Filter in Idiomatic Translation: Case of English Translation of Moradi Kermani's Carpet-Weaving Factory Children

The present paper aims to provide a critical analysis of how cultural filter has been applied in Chris Lear’s and Soheila Sahabi’s (2000) English translation of Houshang Moradi Kermani’s Bachehaye Qalibafkhaneh [Carpet-Weaving Factory Children] (1980/2011) with a particular view to the short story “Razou, Asadou and Khajijeh”. The paper, more specifically, focuses on the rendering of “idioms” as a typical example of culture-specificity in translation. Khanjan’s Critical Translation Analysis (CTA) Model (2012, 2013), which draws on Halliday’s Systemic-Functional linguistics (1994, 2004), has been adopted as the analytical framework. CTA addresses both endogenous (intra-textual) and exogenous (social and extra-textual) parameters involved in translation and, in so doing, it takes heel of both the product and the process of translation. Given the two CTA underlying assumptions of “translation as re-contextualization” and “translating as filtering”, the present study aims to show how appropriate have been the translators’ applications of cultural filter to target contextual requirements. The paper findings indicate that “making descriptive (or directional) equivalents” and “finding cultural (i.e. natural or bidirectional) equivalents”, with the highest frequencies of occurrence among translation strategies adopted by the translators, have generally led to relative functional equivalence relations. When confronted with radically culture-specific idioms, however, the translators have mostly ignored the idioms in question all together and have, accordingly, resulted in a relative loss of domestic rural culture intended by the author.