An Investigation into National and Religious Identities of Translators in Hybrid Novels: Duma’s Translated Works in Iran

Despite the shift of translation studies from linguistic aspects to extralinguistic ones, the role of some extralinguistic factors, such as translators’ national and religious identities has received little attention. In recognition of this fact, the purpose of this study was to identify the role of the translator’s national and religious identities in their choice of translation strategies in the translation of hybrid novels from English into Persian. To this end, a descriptive and comparative analysis was conducted. Two Dumas’ English novels along with six translations formed the corpus of this study. These novels belong to immigration literature which can provide rich examples of hybridity and multilingualism. First, hybrid parts in the original versions and their translations were identified. Next, the original texts and their translations were compared and lexical, sentential and pragmatic shifts in translation of hybrid elements were identified. Finally, the translation strategies revealing the presence of national and religious identities of translators in the translation were identified based on Klinger’s (2014) model. The findings revealed that translators’ strategies can be indicative of their national and religious identities.